When we pay attention to the amount of injustice in the world, we find ourselves wanting to do something about it. And we don’t want to do just anything. We want to participate in what can most strategically stop those injustices. We need to organize together to confront what is killing us and the planet.
If you go looking for others involved in this resistance work, you might stumble across some organizations that seem to have all the answers. They say they know exactly how to bring capitalism to its knees. And they’re often recruiting new members like you to take part in the Revolution.
But when organizations offer easy answers and tell you all you need to do is step in line with their orders, it should raise some red flags.
Before we get swept away by their revolutionary aesthetics, one-size-fits-all plans, and lefty lingo, we should talk about authoritarian and vanguard communist groups. They often search for young, enthusiastic people who haven’t been warned about them yet or don’t know the warning signs. All the major ones we know of have long histories of abuse. As anarchists, we understand that their embrace of authoritarianism is exactly what makes them so susceptible to being abusive.
This zine outlines red flags to look out for, provides some history of the most well-known authoritarian communist groups’ harmful behavior, and offers a few alternatives to joining them.
We believe that the most strategic way to fight systems of oppression is by fighting collectively. We don’t need to recreate the very power dynamics we’re struggling against to win. But we do need you in the fight.
Yeah of course. They've even read Bookchin and the anarchist authors. It's not as if anarchism is the one true faith and all it will take is some enlightenment for all to come to it. Different people have different experiences and come with different conclusions. Under a different set of experiences, I could have thought Marxism-Leninism would be the logical conclusion. What makes Marxism-Leninism in the Philippines unique is that unlike Marxism-Leninism in the West, which is often anti-revisionist (and thus Stalinist), de-Stalinization forced a rethinking of principles and experimentation with new ideas. This, of course, happened in the United States as well. Angela Davis, once a staunch supporter of Soviet authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, eventually changed her mind on Marxism-Leninism after the collapse of the USSR and led a non-Leninist bloc within the CPUSA. What makes the US different is that the post-1989 wave of de-Stalinization in Western Europe saw former MLs rebrand as democratic socialists while the true faith MLs kept the ML brand. In the Philippines, the wave of de-Stalinization after the end of the dictatorship saw instead a reclaiming of the Marxist-Leninist brand while repudiating Maoism (but not Mao Zedong Thought).
See you there then!