What is the thing that holds the radical left back today, more than anything else? Is it capitalist realism? Is it the pervasiveness of false consciousness promoted by the right via their control of the mass media? Is it a collective sense of fatal defeat resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Is it the vestiges of the American Dream, the aspirations of the modern proletariat to join the ranks of the petite-bourgeoisie by opening a Chili's franchise and putting their savings into index funds?
No. Obviously these problems are not insignificant, but we have a much bigger problem. To put it frankly, we don't have a great track record of managing internal conflict within our movement.
From the very beginning, we leftists have been our own worst enemies. The history of the left has been the history of leftist infighting: the statist-anarchist split in the First International in the 1870s; the Spartacist uprising and its suppression by the SPD; the Kronstadt Rebellion; the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR, which resulted in the Fourth Internationalist tendency; the hostility between the CNT-FAI and other Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War; the Yugo-Soviet split; the Sino-Soviet split; one could fill several thick volumes detailing the splits, breakaways, and sectarian disputes that have arisen within the left.
You've probably had your blood pressure rise a bit after just reading that list. It's very important to remember: the U.S. police state's most successful tactics for thwarting the emergence of effective radical left-wing organization have been the tactics of the COINTELPRO program, which exploited and weaponized these internal disputes to raise their tenor to a fever pitch, drowning out anything that ever approached a call for unity and a positive plan of action.
So how do we combat these tendencies? What kind of rules and norms can we create that will allow radical leftists of all stripes to play nice long enough to be in the same room together and have an interesting, meaningful conversation about literally anything?
It starts with talking to other people offline. You should have offline leftist friends. Maybe some of them are social democrats. Maybe some of them are anarchists. Maybe some of them are Marxist-Leninists. Maybe some of them are really into Deleuze and Guattari. One way or another, you should have offline friends who are interested in progressive politics and critical theory. If you don't have any friends like that, get some.
I'll come right out and say: it is actively harmful to only ever talk about politics online. It is harmful to never talk to your real-life friends about politics. Get some lefty friends, who live in your area, and meet somewhere, *outside the computer*, such as a library, cafe, random street corner, empty lot, et cetera. Gather your lefty friends together into a common location, and talk about stuff. Perhaps you have a meeting explicitly focused on politics. Perhaps you have more of a casual hangout session. Whatever you plan with your lefty friends, it is vitally important that you *talk to them* in real life. On a regular basis.
Talking to other people in person has a way of defusing conflicts that have a natural tendency to erupt in the onlineosphere. This does *not* mean that you are forbidden to talk about politics online. Only that you should be meeting with people in a physical space on a regular basis to talk about these topics, and if you aren't doing that, that's a problem.
No, of course not. Is anything? This is just a good starting point. As with anything, more practice will shape our theory to produce a more effective praxis.