Really love this piece as a historical breakdown of the short and tumultuous history of the Marxist Center, a group that I had vague knowledge of but no actual experience. I appreciate the conscientious tone toward nearly all involved here and what appears to be a very level-headed analysis of what occurred.
There is an easy narrative you could spin here: MC collapsed because some people did not believe in its project enough, it collapsed because of potential infiltration, it collapsed because it was betrayed by groups who believed they were base-building but who were actually sectarian organizations. This is all far too simple and far too clean. MC was not betrayed, it was destroyed by its own contradictions which were, at every step of the way, avoided.
It genuinely sucks to hear about this sort of thing, not because I have any real connections to the MC, but because I think it is a very common story of "leftists want to make things better, leftists are inherently questioning people, leftists without good strategies to handle working together fail to work together".
It's very interesting to read this while working through Season 3 of the Revolutions Podcast, on the French Revolution. Obviously there are hugely different contexts between the protocommunist sans-culottes in the waning years of the French Revolution and uh, modern lefties trying to Build The Base, but there are definite commonalities. It is hard to build unified power together when your enemies (fascists) are content to simply draw a party line and disempower/imprison/kill all those outside of that line.
It is the task of communists, in this and all moments, to unify the advanced sections of the working class, bring up the intermediate sections, and isolate the backwards sections. To engage in this work we have to recognize that anyone we interact with has a pre-existing awareness of their situation. That our goal is not just to win vaguely defined campaigns and policies, to find some group of ‘normal people’ who have never once thought about their lives and fill their minds with predetermined correct ideas, but to develop a socialist vision which we both bring people into and redefine as we work with others. That those who are ‘already convinced’ of the necessity of socialism do not come to us with their brains pre-filled with all the right information, and for that matter neither do we. This realization requires that we constantly weave ideological work into our organizational work if we are not just going to reproduce the class barriers of our society within our organizations. If we were to build a MC’ of political vision which brings the workers and socialist movements together, we must go through a long process of articulation and cohesion, of compromise and influence, of communication of ideas between people who agree on those ideas. In short, we needed to unite with the most active segments of the workers movement, and from there needed to educate our lowest comrades to the highest levels. By focusing our eyes on ‘normal workers,’ base-building and its offshoots pointed us in the exact opposite direction.
Putting Circles Mag on my reading list for sure.