If you hang around socialist spaces online, you’ll regularly see someone make a very earnest post asking for ideas about how to stop leftist infighting. This isn’t surprising. Seeing how divided the left is can feel troubling when we’re so far from taking power.
The topic of leftist infighting usually comes up because of one of two things. The first is when ostensibly leftist politicians in the electoral system fall out over policy or fail to live up to socialist standards, and then get trashed online for taking dubious actions. The second is when people get worn down by the endless, and sometimes hostile debate in online spaces.
Luckily, when we examine the causes of leftist infighting and how it affects real world organising, we see that what at first appeared to be a problem might actually serve to strengthen the socialist movement.
Why Does Leftist Infighting Happen?
People trashing AOC for abstaining on the Iron Dome vote, or calling her a liberal for her “tax the rich” slogans, gives us our first hint at what’s going on. The people attacking AOC for the most part aren’t socialists who lack an appropriate level of solidarity with a comrade, they’re people who have a fundamentally different view about what socialism is and how to achieve it. To the Democratic Socialist, keeping Team Left well supported amongst the electorate is key to building the socialist electoral movement. But to the Marxists who are trashing AOC or whoever else, the electoral system is a way to spread our message to the masses, not a way to win power. The two groups view the electoral system in a fundamentally different way, and react to events within it from their own worldview.
This is also the cause of the endless debate in leftist spaces online generally. Socialists of various sorts want broadly the same thing: the end of capitalism, an economy that’s owned and controlled by the mass of the people, and for everyone’s needs to be met. The trouble is that different groups have a different understanding of how our current society functions and how to achieve socialism.
Democratic Socialists see the electoral system as a route to power, while Marxists and Anarchists generally see the electoral system as a sham that’s meant to control the masses. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialists tend to view revolutionary organising as illegitimate because it’s potentially violent and because it’s undemocratic, (since it doesn’t happen through the liberal electoral system.)
Clearly, asking these groups to form a unified party is a no-go, not least because many anarchists oppose the idea of political parties to begin with.
When you ask all these groups to join together into a single movement, you’re asking people who don’t believe that socialism can be voted in to join with people who think that we need to achieve socialism through the ballot box; you’re asking people who think we need to build a mass movement to work with people who think that we need to engage in guerilla warfare; and you’re asking people who think that we need our own political party to work with people who think that centralised authority of that kind leads to “authoritarianism”.
These aren’t differences of opinion that can be negotiated away and compromised on, for the sake of building a common movement. These are fundamentally different understandings of society that make the approaches of these groups incompatible. These differences of understanding are the reason that these groups are separate in the first place.
Ultimately, a call for left unity, while well intentioned, can only come from someone who doesn’t understand the ideologies of the various groups on the left, and how they’re fundamentally incompatible.
Leftist Groups Still Work Together
While you’re not going to get different socialist groups to throw all their efforts into the same party, socialists still regularly work together. Marxist-Leninists, Anarchists, and Democratic Socialists all organise and join protests together against war, or in favour of reforms that benefit workers. They all go out and support strikes together or campaign for better housing conditions. In real life, members of these different groups have no problem working with each other on common goals, and do so on a regular basis.
But then, why all the fighting?
The Purpose of Endless Debate
Members of all these different groups want to build a world that’s free from exploitation. In order to do that, we need to choose effective methods of bringing about a transition to socialism and maintaining it. That’s where the endless debate comes in.
Working out a good theoretical and historical understanding is essential if our movement is going to succeed, and that’s best done by not only reading ourselves and putting what we learn into practice, but also by discussing what we’ve learned with each other.
In an ideal world, all these political discussions would happen calmly and in good faith. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality of internet culture at the moment, so a lot of these conversations are more argumentative than they need to be. That aside, constantly challenging our own and each other’s ideas can only strengthen our movement.
The endless infighting is mostly an online phenomena, because that’s where we come to discuss theory and history. For most real life actions, various groups are either willing to work together or at least stay out of each other’s way.
If you want to learn more about socialist thought, our Marxism 101 course is a great place to start.
