I went to a small meeting for my party, and at the end, one of us went on an anti-Russia and anti-Soviet rant (He’s a Trotskyist). He started with saying that Russia buys gold from Sudanese rebels in exchange for Russian weapns for those rebels. I don’t know if that is true although I don’t necessarily doubt it, and another one of us said it’s probably not only Russia giving weapons to Sudan, but US as well. He said that this proves that Russia is imperialist and that he doesn’t understand why communist parties in the global south support Russia. I said to him that even though Russia has imperial ambitions and capitalist nations always move towards imperialism, I can see why global south countries want to work more with Russia since cooperation with Russia is less harmful that cooperation with the USA. I specifically said that it is choosing for a lesser evil, in order to convince him better.
Then he started talking about how Putin uses Siberian native soldiers as cannon folder to protect ethnic Russians. He then said that this is a holdover from Stalin who kept the colonial system from the Tsar were and that Central Asian and Siberian Native soldiers were sent to the front first in order to protect Russians. He said that Soviet Union was a colonial nation as well for the Russians and Belarussians and that the Soviet Union fell because of this colonisation and that Gorbachov was the first one who tried to correct it.
After that the other member said that it’s hard to convince others when there are not many examples of actually socialism. She then named Cuba as a dictatorship, and I called her out and said it was not. Luckily she was receptive. The trotskyist defended me as well saying that Cuba ‘is not as bad’ and he mentioned that Cuba has a lot of international solidarity because they for example sent doctors to Northern Italy during covid. But he didn’t mention that international solidarity for Cuba also means that they support Russia lol. Then we started talking about Che, and he said that Che wanted to become a minister in Cuba but was forced to leave Cuba by the Soviet Union, because they didn’t like him. I said that it was hard to believe and that I didn’t hear about it. He forgot where he got that from and said that not many people know about it.
I definitely held back a lot, and should’ve gone harder sometimes, but it’s harder when the other person brings up so much random wild stuff that you don’t know how to start to refute it.
What are some strategies for the next time?
Reading this made me remember how much I do not miss being a party leader.
There are two good ways to can try to handle this situation, and both may look like hostility if egos are at play.
The first is to simply talk to the Trot directly in private and try to direct them towards better historians and convince them to read ML theory. If they’re receptive, they might shift their ideological position and stop being a nuisance. If it fails, they could claim that you’re trying to “bully” them into being a “Stalinist”.
The second is to talk to either party leadership or fellow party members and try to get them to agree on more rigid party lines. If successful, it’ll become easier to keep conversations on track and productive, as most of your party members will agree that tirades against the USSR aren’t helpful. You can pair this with readings or studies of the USSR to help the less informed members of the party come to a mutual understanding. If it fails, they could accuse you of trying to co-opt the party and get you kicked out.
These are the kinds of murky waters I had to try to navigate daily within my party when it existed, inner-party politics is a hard game to play, and it usually results in battles of egos.
moving to a reply for a similar story (really it’s a rant) of my own.
My party had a few anarchists in it, they made up something like 10% of the party at a point. A small enough percentage that you can simply ignore them during votes or party motions, but a big enough number that you couldn’t ignore them during discussions.
There was one Anarchist who would volunteer themself to speak on behalf of all Anarchists at every discussion, taking personal issue with anything that could possibly upset an Anarchist. A member of the party might want to simply talk about the great technological innovations that happened in the USSR, and that Anarchist would find a way to steer the discussion towards “USSR bad”. A member might want to discuss the guerrilla fighting in the Cuban revolution, the Anarchist would go on and on about how Cuba is “an authoritarian dictatorship”. This goes so on, and so forth. And every time we tried to bring up the issues that were created by them doing that, the 29 other Anarchists would stand up with them and claim we were trying to make them leave.
Leadership thought it would be a good idea to make them their own wing within the party, so they could be autonomous and have their own discussions apart from the main party discussions. They treated it like we were moving them to the “kiddie’s table” and threatened to start disrupting other party functions. A few members of leadership decided, without consulting all of leadership, to appoint that very vocal Anarchist to a seat within leadership to keep them from complaining as much.
Nobody abused the power of leadership in our party like they did. They would make unilateral decisions without asking anyone else.
Later on, we would find out that the whole thing was an ego trip for them. They liked feeling like they were at odds against any authority, so they’d put themself into positions to be at odds with party leadership. When they were put into leadership, they had no idea how difficult the position actually was, so they simply refused to act within the guidelines.