LOUISVILLE CPUSA

A key failure of ultra-leftism is its inability to distinguish between who mobilizes a movement and who comprises it.

Mass demonstrations by the working class, even those initiated by bourgeois forces, reflect genuine class discontent. To dismiss this outright because of the momentary organizers is to surrender the whole of mass consciousness to the enemy. The task of revolutionaries is not to stand outside and lob purity critiques, but to immerse ourselves in these movements in order to ruthlessly and functionally expose, not only in words but also in deeds, the limitations of the liberal leadership while rallying the advanced elements toward social revolution.

Millions of workers protesting reactionary policies aren’t automatically “duped” simply because liberals or even conservative anti-Trump elements play a role. That isn’t how it works, and until our work is finished, they will always play some role or another. The masses enter struggle through the ideological frameworks available to them; it is the duty of revolutionaries to provide them with a clearer framework. The ideological frameworks immediately available to the masses are, by necessity, those that the bourgeoisie and its intermediaries have spent lifetimes cultivating and sharpening.

There is a cognitive dissonance at play, a simultaneous recognition that millions are being led astray by liberalism combined with the delusion that abstention, or shouting from afar, will somehow break this hold.

To correctly diagnose the problem: mass movements are co-opted by bourgeois forces which divert energy into harmless symbolism, yet the proposed “solution” amounts, in practice, to surrendering entirely. Liberals dominate these struggles precisely because revolutionaries are absent or marginal, so how does further self-isolation correct this? No oppressed group has ever awakened to revolutionary politics through some theoretical revelation; it is only through the experience of struggle, and the consequentially demonstrated failure of bourgeois solutions, that workers and the oppressed can shed such long held illusions.

The logic mirrors a doctor who, upon finding somebody that’s been poisoned, withholds the antidote on the basis that the patient should never have been poisoned in the first place.