“I’m a Trotskyist.” “I’m a Maoist.” “I’m a Marxist-Leninist.”

I really believe labels are keeping the Left from uniting, whether under a Marxist umbrella or other leftist ideologies. Group-affiliated and leaderist leftists are bound apart, unable to find common ground, from critically thinking not only about their “rivals” but also about themselves. Group-affiliated Marxists, for example, often chose their favorite historical communist, defend everything they ever did (never asking why “their version” didn’t work out or at least placing the blame elsewhere), and become as dogmatic as the imperialists they’re up against.

Definition: guaranteed failure.

The ISO is Trotskyist. The RCP is Maoist. The WWP is Stalinist. And I just can’t find a home in any of them.

What’s a forward-thinking radical Marxist to do? I dig Lenin. I think Trotsky would have been better than Stalin. And yes, I will concede that Mao *did* do some really important things for Feudal China. And while I just can’t get behind Stalin, I can, through actually sitting and chatting with friends from the Workers World Party, understand why they would want to defend Stalin in some ways.

Then, of course, you have to consider the authoritariaism Lenin placed on the people post-revolution. Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Stalin’s… Stalinsim! And Trotsky, who never got a chance to fuck it up, probably would have (this does, however, make Trotsky easier to defend).

That’s a question Trotskyists need to ask: If he’d come to power instead of Stalin, what could have led him to failure?

The most productive things these Marxist Leaderists could do is be better able to criticize their ideological lineage without immediately going on the defense: “Yeah, making children in Tibet shoot their parents who refused to drop religion *was* kind of fucked up… but look at the literacy rate Mao’s armies brought to the region!” These kinds of post-defenses never increase my liking of Mao… they only reaffirm my belief that most Marxists today are doomed to fail if they don’t admit to their idol’s failures as communists.

I’m not saying Leaderists don’t criticize their own idols within their own ranks. But most WWP supporters would never purely denounce Stalin’s very real genocide in the presence of “outsiders.” And I’ve never met a Maoist that willingly, without being asked, questioned the good of the Cultural Revolution without mentioning the supposed “good intentions” behind it (more on that later), or far more often, bringing up an unrelated benefit to Maoism.

What it really boils down to is the question of legitimacy. We need legitimate Marxism to make it work. Most people’s main opposition to socialism is that they have a) read American text books that do in fact revise a lot of history, and b) that they, regardless of biased and revisionist history, do know the truth about how socialist states have gone. While many people may be surprised to find that China is not, in fact, communist, and has not been for some time (or ever, depending on who you ask), they do know that socialism hasn’t exactly worked thus far. This would be a fantastic opportunity for Marxist thinkers to engage new audiences, converse without lecturing, ask the people where they believe we’ve gone wrong in the past, and yes, correct inaccuracies when needed. Unfortunately, no Marxist Leaderist group I have ever encountered is willing to do this. No matter how much they claim to see the need for conversation, debate, critical thought, etc, most of them write off any criticism of their idols as “revisionism” and lecture. And I think most believe they are doing socialism a big favor by remaining unconditionally positive about every single thing their idol has done, but what they really do is reaffirm all the negative sentiment about socialism, what it is, why it’s needed, and how we can take the problems from the past and make great strides toward a better future. I have always held true that it is not communism that has failed, but communists, and if we’re never going to address that, we’re just going to see the same failure again and again until we have nothing more to offer.

In the very divided depths of the struggle,
E.G. Smith