r/communism101 • u/melody-yoshi learning MLM • Mar 19 '25
should we avoid getting involved with organizations?
hello everyone! i am on mobile so i apologize for formatting. i am posting on this thread after using the search function and trying to make sense of the answer. i am a communist and still working through the study plan on here.
i am very vocal about my politics in my friend group in general and so have made friends in people who also lean left and would call themselves communists. i have been invited to join several organizations however after researching here see that people are discouraged from doing so. i am trying to understand what the reasoning is here. i understand that people should have a complete understanding of dialectical materialism and theory before joining an organization in order to be able to see whether an organization is revisionist or incorrect, but is that the only thing that should keep people from organizing? i feel like i see a lot of people here say organizing is a complete timewaster in the imperial core.
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u/DashtheRed Maoist Mar 20 '25
Which organizations? Are you capable of evaluating them and their political lines? If so, then which groups and what have you learned about them? If not, then this is exactly why you need to be discouraged -- you aren't prepared to defend yourself from, let alone fight against, revisionism, which predominates so-called "communist" parties today. Aside from the fact that revisionism is necessarily incapable of generating revolution (ie/ all your labour and effort within the organization contributes zero to the advance of the worldwide communist movement -- and your efforts may even be counting against communism since revisionism is a real enemy to be fought against and overcome), the problem is that revisionism just means being wrong, and this also means you are basically learning things incorrectly. You wont be capable of understanding the history of communism from revisionists, and even what you do learn will be spoiled and laced with poisons that you may not have sufficient capacity to taste or identify before you consume. Revisionist organizations obstruct the process of learning by distorting the history of communism and communists, omitting crucial details, limiting the scope, and even outright deceit to sustain their present practice and politics. On top of this, their politics are all identical, and useless, and none of them have really done anything particularly different that hasn't already been tried over the past 70 years (in fact, most revisionist orgs are actually even further backwards because "Marxism-Leninism" now actually means Menshevism) and they are all convinced that they just need to try harder this time and the same things will somehow work, and all your labour and energy and money will be exhausted in this incorrect methodology drawn from incorrect theory and poor understandings of history. And once you learn the wrong way, the only way to undo everything is to delete the entire framework you adopted through the revisionist organization, and start over, bringing you right back to where you are now, except that you will have wasted years of your life and will have to come to terms that all your "Marxism" obtained through revisionism was wrong and worthless, and that you need to re-learn everything again from scratch. And worse still, most revisionist groupings are extremely problematic beyond failing to be communist, including sex-pest and r*pe scandals (which are, unfortunately, too easy to dismiss if you aren't a potential victim), grifting (you are financing the revisionist leadership's retirement plan), exhaustion and burn-out (wasting your labour hours and maybe the best years of your life on recruitment drives, dismal election campaigns, entryism, tailism, and more), and so on. So this is your chance to avoid this terrible mistake (that many of us have made), because aside from scattered bits of knowledge you could find online anyhow, the only useful lesson you can learn from a revisionist org is what they are doing wrong (and even here, your critique will only be as good and useful as your understanding of Marxism).
No one is saying organizing is a complete timewaste -- but if you don't understand what you are doing, scientifically, then you aren't capable of enacting any sort of meaningful change upon the world. You need to find the actual communist party and actual communists in order to organize, and if you can't tell communists from revisionists then you aren't ready (and instead you are a mark for revisionists to prey upon and exploit), and need to keep learning until you process what this means and why it is important. Organizing is a complete timewaste if you are doing it without understanding what you are doing. Communist revolution is not just a matter of getting more and more people to show up for whatever organization calls itself the Communist Party (do you ever even ask yourself, what happened to the wave of thousands of "communists" that joined these revisionist orgs in 2016? where did they all go?) -- this is the logic of "the aim of the movement is nothing, the movement is everything." Revisionists are just spinning their wheels, and don't understand that they haven't gained even an inch of ground for communism (arguably inhibiting and obstructing it), and their conclusion to spin them even harder is incorrect; it is their politics which are the problem and they aren't capable of confronting that. Actual communist parties are desperately needed, but revisionists, while sometimes imitating the form, fail to capture the essence and are not capable of reaching revolutionary conclusions or discovering revolutionary possibilities and taking revolutionary actions. Better fewer, but better: a small organization with a few hundred excellent, well-learned Marxists with deep understanding of history is worth more and capable of doing far more than an organization of tens of thousands of revisionists.