https://www.codepink.org/march18
Nationwide protests shot off on the 18th and 19th. Did you see any coverage?
The revolution will not be televised. RATWM is a fascist maneuvering and nothing more, attempting to recoup some of the brewing anti-war sentiment back into supporting capitalism and by extension imperialism. Libertarians, pedo “communists”, and outright fascists? We don’t fucking need them and I find it frustrating when people seem to think we do.
RATWM was televised because it was backed by money. Dirty, bloody money coming from the likes of the Paul political dynasty. Their pathetic little gathering was not the revolutionary moment some people seemed to imply it was. It was a farce. The people will rise up and they won’t need ghoulish demagogues to pay them to.
Fucking PatSocs muddying the struggle as always.
This rant by Jacqueline Lugman is also worth reading: https://www.blackagendareport.com/why-rage-against-war-machine-rally-antiwarsowhite
"Because I must point out that much of this discourse around defending these bigots and transphobes in the new Libertarian Party among white anti-war veterans looks, sounds, and feels like plain ol’ liberal racism, where the allegedly nice white people gaslight us for pointing out that the people they want to do business with would just as soon see us wiped out, so we cannot - for our own safety and that of our comrades - align with those forces and people.
In response, the allegedly nice white people dismiss our concerns, tell us that we’re making too much of nothing like we always do, and that we’re the reason no change can happen because we don’t want to work with anybody. We’re too stuck on “ideological purity” or worse, “identity politics” rather than building a broad coalition. That’s racist gaslighting y’all and there is really no other way to call that. Especially when they try to support their flimsy arguments against us by using quotes by Frederick Douglass or the example of the original Rainbow Coalition led by the Black Panther Party to prove to us that we should unite with racist white people. Except that they, once again, remove all context from their examples, and have not done anything close to what those freedom fighters did to challenge racist domination.
Hell, these white leftists won’t even ADMIT that the folks organizing this rally have a bigotry problem, let alone require them to repudiate it as the Black Panther Party did with the members of the Young Patriots who may have been racist, as Frederick Douglass did in challenging the system of white supremacist domination. No, these white Latte Leftists are not making ANY demands of the organizers of this event for their party’s bigotry and that of some of the speakers aligned with their party, but they are making all the demands of US to capitulate to them, So the misuse of our own history against us is an additional racist insult committed by the #AntiWarSoWhite crowd
Absolutely. I like that article a lot, quite informative I think.
Exactly what I’m talking about as well. We will lose comrades to fascistic and libertarian ideological infection, not the other way around. We would not represent a sizable force in these astroturfed gatherings. We would be political slaves to the Libertarians.
I think we shouldn’t reject any anti-war initiative no matter which side it comes from. Ultimately anything that weakens and discredits the imperialist war machine is beneficial to the revolutionary cause. This doesn’t mean we join forces with reactionaries, but that we don’t actively fight against any initiative that for whatever reason advocates against NATO and its global warmongering, even when some very shitty people are involved who have a much different agenda than ours. Let them do their thing while we focus on our task which is to build our own principled working class anti-war, anti-imperialist movement. Wasting our energies denouncing reactionaries who are cynically trying to co-opt popular anti-war sentiments not only weakens the anti-war cause, it also discredits us in the eyes of the masses and is a boon to the reactionaries. If we think we can do better than them and build a more effective anti-war front (and i think we absolutely can because we are coming at this from a principled perspective and not from political opportunism) then we should just do it and not knock other anti-war voices down.
This might be an unpopular opinion but i say it because i really think we have to learn to think and act more strategically and resist the liberal impulses we may have for virtue signaling and purity tests. It is to the benefit of the class enemy that we waste our time constantly criticizing but never actually doing.
I agree that an ideological struggle between two ostensibly anti-war ‘movements’ is more of a distraction than a benefit, as the principle contradiction is empire and we should be able and willing to unify around that common cause.
I take umbrage with some comrades’ pleas to attend gatherings that I believe are rotten from top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top. There likely exist more than a couple of well-intentioned individuals or even groups that will tag along and organize with the fascistic “anti-imperialists” and they should not be forgotten or discounted as potential allies.
I feel that for some reason principled MLs seem to understand that CPUSA constantly tailing and coordinating action with the Democrats is a failing effort and one that ultimately leads to not entryist success but the subsumation of the capital-C Communist movement into a political farce that does nothing outside of the paramaters of what their more powerful masters want them to do, so nothing outside of the confines of bourgeois legality. It turns a revolutionary party into a lame duck reformist party and more communists will be lost to democrats than vice-versa. So why do some call for us to actively participate in a “movement” that is so obviously astroturfed by the fucking Libertarian Party? While not as powerful as the democrats or the republicans, the Libertarians represent first and foremost bourgeois interests, including the military industrial complex. They will turn on temporary revolutionary allies immediately, and they will not be as kind as the democrats (who already literally kill us).
I don’t know. Maybe I’m off-base. But genuine anti-imperialism is already attracting huge swathes of people, of proletarians. It’s a work-in-progress, but it is working to a noticeable extent. Perhaps not fast enough, but that’s another issue.
My position is that we need not necessarily participate in anti-war initiatives organized by reactionaries, but we also should not oppose or denounce said initiatives (of course in all other contexts we should continue to ruthlessly criticize and fight against those reactionaries!) since that does not benefit us in any way. We should build and organize our own anti-war front just as Lenin advocated for communists to build their own party and not join bourgeois ones. Communists must not allow themselves to be subsumed into either liberal or reactionary politics, we must remain separate and advance our own revolutionary and unapologetically proletarian, class conscious views and agenda because no other groups will. Occasionally we can work with non-communist groups on an issue by issue basis but that is purely tactical.
I think I agree with your position, thank you for the valuable input comrade.
