this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Yeah, this just seems divorced from reality and idealist in itself. A communist party is shaped by its membership, for sure, some of its original members had been a part of a party led by Sam Marcy, and had found their way to Marxism-Leninism that way, but the party has grown dramatically and that historical footnote has become more and more of just that, a footnote. People are joining the party identifying as Marxist Leninist… Sam Marcy’s contribution is sort of a footnote outside of those who left SWP, as the Global Class War Thesis was basically a class analysis of the Cold War during the Korean War identifying Imperialism as the primary contradiction(not exactly mind blowing these days). What is more, the PSL deviates significantly from your definition of Marcyism because they look to AES as socialist in character, and support them, with their own contradictions that leftists in the imperial core aren’t in a position to judge.

It is sort of idealist to always constantly view struggle through the lens of abstract tendencies and thoughts without giving consideration to the actual concrete reality at work and the people doing social practice. You are labeling a party because 70 years ago some guy led a different party? It is sort of meaningless. They identify themselves as an independent communist party, Marxist-Leninist and antifactionalist. Nobody is joining because of Sam Marcy. Education materials don’t typically mention him all that frequently, if they do at all. If anything all of this minutia about what constitutes a tendency is super alienating to working class people and often irrelevant today, because what other communists were struggling over internally in a different historical context, although important to study and learn from, isn’t really going to provide perfect answers to the material reality of organizing today, here, in a different context. We are so far from achieving what we need to do to build a revolutionary party, constantly splitting hairs without grounding it in practice isn’t really productive