In a rare moment of making a post, something I am not liable to do often here, I will reblog this post in support. Living, as I do, not in the United States, I nonetheless find that there is often, in the Left, whether here or abroad, a pernicious tendency toward sectarianism for the purpose of sectarianism. This is, of course, nothing new, but we need to remember that the sectarianism of leftists in the 19th and 20th centuries often arose, primarily, out of disagreements of praxis, or the logical conclusions of theoretical assumptions. This can be neatly illustrated with an example from 1970s Iran.
In 1970-1971, the two Iranian thinkers Amir Parviz Puyan and Massoud Ahmadzade published The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Survival Thesis, and Armed Struggle: Both a Strategy and a Tactic, the former by Puyan and the latter by Ahmadzade. The thesis of their works is that, following the failure of the 1953 popular anti-imperialist movement around Mossadeq, and the brutal suppression of the Tudeh Party, the establishment of SAVAK and the reforms brought about by the White Revolution separated intellectuals and proletarians from each other and, effectively, rendered labour organizing and consciousness-raising impossible. Likewise, the revolutionary potential of peasants was smothered by land reform, meaning that the exile Tudeh Party's 'strategy' of trying to secure legalization again, while refraining in exile, effectively did little more than hand the initiative to the compradorist Pahlavi state.
The logical conclusion, writes Puyan, was that revolutionary practice was that "to remain isolated is tantamount to annihilation". The policy of remaining in hiding, biding one's time, was foolish and a death sentence for Iranian socialism. To neutralize the metaphysical construction of simply waiting for the "opportune moment to arrive", Puyan correctly identifies the need for praxis, not theory, to form the central axle around which Marxist-Leninist elements can unite, forcing the imperialist puppet government to grow ever harsher in its retaliation and thus, hopefully, setting the conditions for struggle and eventually proletarian revolution.
Ahmadzade elaborates on Puyan's theories by suggesting that the very existence of the armed movement itself was proof that Lenin's objective preconditions for revolution were already met, but that the aforementioned separation prevented them from being fulfilled. Thus, the armed movement of guerrillas would be required to take immediate action through military struggle, acting as the "small motor" that would help start the "large motor" of complete revolution.
Bizhan Jazani, another Iranian socialist theorist, took severe issue with Ahmadzade's theory. His most extensive criticism of it is the one he published in his 1975 War Against the Shah's Dictatorship, in which he (rightly, in my opinion) identifies the argument from revolutionary conditions as tautological. Furthermore, Jazani predicts that the logical conclusion of Ahmadzade's theory would be either a surrender of armed struggle when the promised joining of the masses to the struggle fails to manifest, or a 'left-wing tendency' which can only answer with more intensification of the armed struggle.
As alternative, Jazani proposed the theory of armed revolutionary propaganda, following Puyan's thesis that it was armed struggle itself, the revolutionary praxis, that would allow the armed movement to sharpen the conditions for revolution. Jazani goes further, however, by elaborating extensively on the nature of the revolutionary organization, suggesting a "two-legged" structure in which guerrilla operations (the first leg) should strictly be rejected unless they fulfilled a purpose that could be propagandized effectively to the masses by the second leg, the political movement that the organization's non-clandestine members should construct and lead. This would be done by using the state's reprisals against the guerrilla movement to polarize society and ultimately assume the position of the vanguard by forcing the state to "massify" the struggle, rather than presuming that it already held this position. Jazani, in other words, provided the template for which the movement could bring about the unity of Marxist-Leninist elements that Puyan sought.
Jazani's armed propaganda is, according to himself, utterly useless at actually damaging the regime. Rather, its purpose is to raise awareness, to serve an educative and didactic function that will necessarily raise the consciousness of the masses. Even though the objective conditions for revolution may not have existed in Iran, it was possible—he believed—to create them manually. Armed operations had no purpose except as a key to build a political movement and break the spell of repression; the operations of the armed movement would thus allow the form of the struggle to also determine the content of the national liberation war.
The disagreement between these two positions is, I believe, quite obvious. Nonetheless, both adherents of Jazani and Ahmadzade remained in the same Organization of Iranian People's Fadai Guerrillas for some 9 years, until the catastrophic events of the Islamic Revolution, and its eventual decimation by the nascent Islamic Republic. We won't go into that, but what I am trying to illustrate here is that there is a reciprocal relationship between theory and praxis; each strengthens the other.
Disagreements in the modern Left, however, are far too often characterized by what can best be described as a sort of leftist identity politics. This term, of course, has been abused in all sorts of ways, but the issue is fundamentally one of clinging to individual, dogmatic -isms, as a kind of identity signifiers, rather than in reality existing to inform, or outright describe, praxis. When people distinguish between Leninism and Luxembourgism, they fail to understand that both merely saw themselves as Communists—or Social Democrats, in the language of their time—and the theoretical distinction between the two is largely a post-hoc creation, emerging from disagreements purely over how to handle the revolutionary situation.
Because of this, it is essential to ask practical questions, which is what theory seeks to answer. The Left must possess divergence of thought, but convergence of praxis. A variety of different schools of thought protect against stagnation, tautology and self-assuredness, but a convergence of praxis ensures that action is taken toward concrete things at scale that matter. Leftists must not ask themselves, what is the correct theory? They must ask themselves, how do we get people in this locale to support us? How do we get people to turn out for demonstrations? How do we best organize action that can concretely help the victims of United States imperialism? What is a demographic that is currently not organized, but which has potential to become so?
Whoever takes action as part of an organic, united front of the organized Left is a comrade. Flexibility of thought is an advantage, precisely because it will also mean flexibility of action, and a variety of different perspectives to advance the correct perspective on which action to take.
Anyways, apologies this post became kind of a disorganized ramble, I think I got a bit carried away talking about Iranian socialists in the 1970s lmao. I hope my point is illustrated, however.
