This was recently shown when a member of a major anti-imperialist organization made a public controversy out of business that should have remained private. I say it should have been kept internal because within any democratic centralist structure, it’s by definition wrecking behavior to engage in “callout culture” (which I’ve decided to refrain from here by not linking to the post). in this case, the wrecker used the org’s official social media to target another member with vague accusations, then claimed to be victimized by the org when it took away their ability to post. This incident is worth talking about because if you’re in organizing, more disruptive acts like it are now more likely to impact your groups as well.
Cornell is giving inspiration to every individual in these spaces who’s driven by individualist egotism, whether they’re performative “male feminists” or simply someone who doesn’t respect collective discipline. We must combat these problems within our sphere—not by promoting more callout culture, but by enforcing the same standards that are practiced by the world’s effective revolutionary parties and movements.
The actors who seek to abuse organizing structures in this way use the rationale that they’re supposedly combating gender oppression. And there are a couple counters we can use towards this that are based in historical working-class political theory. One is that as Lenin clarified, you do not have the right to mete out “justice” on your own personal terms just because you’re coming from a place of opposition towards the system. This was one of the messages of Dostoyevsky, and there’s a continuity between his thinking and Lenin’s thinking; Dostoyevsky’s whole life’s work was a critique of how narcissistic individuals, who can include “radicals,” believe they possess the authority to define what justice is. Lenin came to the same conclusion when he repudiated the adventurist ultraviolence of the Narodniks.
The other theoretical lesson that refutes the logic of these self-styled feminist crusaders comes from Kollontai, who ridiculed the feminists which put forth “palliatives” that substitute sexual revolution for actual class liberation. This observation predicted everything we’re seeing happen with today’s gender relations, where the traditional family has been replaced by nothing and relationships themselves are increasingly dying out:
How feeble these palliatives, when considered in the light of the gloomy reality of our modern family structure. Before these formulas of “free relationships” and “free love” can become practice, it is above all necessary that a fundamental reform of all social relationships between people take place; furthermore, the moral and sexual norms and the whole psychology of mankind would have to undergo a thorough evolution, is the contemporary person psychologically able to cope with “free love"? What about the jealousy that eats into even the best human souls? And that deeply-rooted sense of property that demands the possession not only of the body but also of the soul of another? And the inability to have the proper respect for the individuality of another? The habit of either subordinating oneself to the loved one, or of subordinating the loved one to oneself? And the bitter and desperate feeling of desertion, of limitless loneliness, which is experienced when the loved ceases to love and leaves?
Where can the lonely person, who is an individualist to the very core of his being, find solace? The collective, with its joys and disappointments and aspirations, is the best outlet for the emotional and intellectual energies of the individual. But is modern man capable of working with this collective in such a way as to feel the mutually interacting influences? Is the life of the collective really capable, at present, of replacing the individual’s petty personal joys? Without the “unique,” “one-and-only” twin soul, even the socialist, the collectivist, is quite alone in the present antagonistic world; only in the working class do we catch the pale glimpse of the future, of more harmonious and more social relations between people.
This is why it’s so critical to root out individualist relationship-related wrecking inside of any working-class org: enforcing collective discipline inside the movement is the only way to realize such a future, where all the participants in civilization are given strong community bonds and a cause that they can partake in alongside others.
It’s the struggle to make these bonds accessible to all people, after technology has outmoded the old forms of social relations, that’s actually the problem we need to focus on amid today’s birthrate decline. The problem with the global collapse in pair-bonding is not necessarily that fewer babies are being born; an economic model that depends on a perpetually growing population isn’t built to last, and socialist China has created an alternative system that can give sustainably good lives to hundreds of millions of old people. The real problem is that people are coming to feel like they have nothing to strive for because they can’t start families anymore, and increasingly can’t even get reliable friends either. The mindset of these Cornell-inspired radical leftists is that this isn’t a serious issue, because they believe “men” are getting what they deserve; which is an outright reactionary position to take, and fully aligns with the interests of the class enemy.
We’re already far enough along in our civilizational decline to see the outcome of the false individualist “revolution” Kollontai warned about. In the United States, there are thirty million men who are single today, whereas they no doubt largely would have had relationships just a generation ago; and you can say these men are incels or whatever, but how is this argument any different from the right-wing demagoguery that attacks all the working families who’ve had to go on food stamps since 2008? Moreover, can you honestly say this situation isn’t also hurting women? We know how much mental health harm comes to both of the sexes when a society has gone down the path we’re headed for; Japan and south Korea have shown us this.
The damage from living in these conditions starts when somebody is a child; you aren’t going to get crucial developmental experiences when you’re growing up as one of the few people your age in your neighborhood or hometown, as illustrated by the Japanese schools with just a handful of children. Under-socialization is just one part of what can break a person; but it’s a kind of tragedy that’s compounded by, and often comes from, the ever-intensifying class exploitation that afflicts all of these countries.
Each of these problems is connected, and our hopes to solve these problems is only hurt by the attitudes that vilify social scapegoats within the working class; with the “incel men” being one of today’s most culturally acceptable targets of this cruelty. Demonizing people for being lonely creates a self-fulfilling prophecy; Japan has also shown us how people start to act when they’ve never known anything other than atomization, and see no hope of escaping it. In Japan, there’s emerged a phenomenon called “invincible people”—individuals who believe they have nothing to lose, and who commit public murders that are completely random.
These are the kinds of illnesses a society will see when it takes away its own basis for continuing, which is why China hasn’t responded to its birthrate decline with apathy; it’s giving more and more financial incentives to families who have children. This won’t solve the problems that are stopping new families from forming in the first place, but at least the CPC has the guiding philosophy that will let it serve as the vehicle for reconstructing these social foundations. As the deeper contradictions from globalization and technological upheaval continue to be drawn out, inevitably the world will see a healing from this problem. What we can do in our own organizing is cultivate real community bonds, uncorrupted by the pettiness that an atomized society has conditioned people into. Only with this internal strength can we defeat the institutional class structures that are strangling our civilization.
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