this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Why shouldn't a comrade practice writing agitational stuff?
If most issues were solved 100 years ago, there wouldn't have been so much trouble 88 years ago or 70 years ago or 34 years ago. It's an evolving cause that should embrace the progression of science, especially when psychology and anthropology have come into their own as rigorous disciplines in the time since Marx and Lenin.
We Demand Tomorrow was a manifesto, and it was good. We'll always have a reason to concretize ideas and adapt them to the circumstances we're in.
A manifesto is a declaration of values, whether for an organization or an individual.
If an individual, then it is electoralism-brained, public preaching on the street corner to prove that one holds the most correct stances. Because in liberal democracy, your political power is reduced to mere enumeration of individual beliefs, rather than organized action. A manifesto of this kind centers the individual for little benefit to the broader working class, if any. The only time it might make sense to publish this kind of manifesto, then, is before some sort of adventurism which is ineffective and individualist for the same reasons.
If an organization, then a manifesto serves as a centralized place to declare the purpose of their concrete activism, as a means of recruitment.
I would assume it would be written with the intent of building up an organization around it.
Are you going to say that our present organizations are perfect, and that we don't need to develop them any further?
Has any effective organization ever began with an individual publishing a manifesto?
If your org is wrong on an issue, you are obligated to critique them. Not doing so is one of the types of liberalism. But I wouldn’t call such a critique a manifesto. It would be an essay. It would have a relatively narrow scope on whatever issue you disagree on.
If you disagree with everything your org is doing, then just leave it.
i think the point here is that a manifesto or a document should come out of collective practice within an organisation, not via mixing together labels from the ideology store
I am personally slapping on barcodes at the ideology store to pass off my communes as libertarian homesteads.
(this is actually a very good way to get free discounts on things in stores, the receipt line items are too byzantine to be efficiently checked)
In a world where countless people haven’t read foundational works of communist theory written by people who actually led revolutions, I think convincing even one person to read that is time better spent than spending god knows how long on the mental masturbation of coming up with one’s own manifesto, that, let’s be real, is never going to be read by anyone.
If you disagree, so be it lol.
Edit: nobody is saying “don’t write agitation”. By all means go at it. OP’s post comes across as trying to reinvent the wheel, not create agitprop around the movements and issues of our times.
Nobody is saying "I'm going to reinvent the wheel of leftism". Your post came across as saying we don't need to write more stuff because what's already out there is enough.
If what’s being added to what’s out there is “a mix of anarcho-communism, world federalism, and environmentalism”, I think we’re good with what’s already out there tbh.