Between Inclusion and Exclusion
From the perspective of a communist movement which seeks to build a mass base, when can someone be considered to be redeemed? When marked by past harmful and reactionary actions, is it necessary to exclude and isolate someone in all cases? Or is making space for redemption necessary to include masses of people, who are bound to be imperfect?
The fundamental question which must be considered when pondering this is what is necessary to successfully build a mass movement with links stretching far and wide. We ought not consider actions as “bad” based solely on principles, but based on pragmatic needs from the perspective of fighting for communism. This means we must consider whether someone can be integrated into a group or mass without disrupting its cohesion, and whether they have truly moved beyond harmful pasts, including by properly making amends for them.
The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion is important to understand how socialists worldwide have approached this issue.
Extreme inclusion, allowing anyone who expresses even lukewarm feelings toward socialism to become leading figures, regardless of their pasts, can in its own way be exclusionary by alienating those affected by those figures. For example, working in coalition with racists on the basis of their expressing crude anti-capitalist views would alienate oppressed ethnic groups from a movement. Extreme exclusion, pushing out anyone who is not fully ideologically developed or has begun development from a place of reactionary views, can at the same time be inclusive in a limited way by making marginalized peoples feel more at home in certain spaces and can hold a higher standard of analysis. Both extreme inclusion and extreme exclusion are limited in their capacity for success in building a revolutionary movement.
The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion can also be expressed in the Marxist terms of tailism (taking no initiative as communists ourselves and instead following popular prejudices) and commandism (interacting with the masses in an absolutist way rather than in dialogue). Communists must link up with the masses without liquidating into them and breaking with principles to follow what is popular rather than refine and guide it, which is the danger of extreme inclusion and tailism. Communists must also be effective in following the ebbs and flows of mass momentum. They should not dogmatically stick by certain strategies when conditions have shifted or demand followers adopt their dogma or be excluded from the movement.
Tailists, represented well by the so-called “dirtbag left”, which has been a notable contingent behind the social democratic contingent of the Democratic Party, end up waving superficial socialist principles when convenient and breaking with them when it is easier. Rather than aiding people in reaching a higher level of consciousness, they merely appeal to what people want, often taking the form of a brand product. They gain mass, but lose a revolutionary direction, losing sight of the entire point of a revolutionary movement. Their forms of teaching are to repeat points back to people, failing to challenge fundamental “common sense” assumptions, and to historicize analyses on the basis of them failing to be easily consumable.
They sometimes reject theory entirely as “elitist,” forgetting the millions of illiterate workers and peasants across the world and across history who have learned Marxist theory in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere. To latch onto popular prejudices, they often promote left-right populist alliances, claiming that because right populists criticize elements of capitalism (anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist), they must be allied with. This faulty assumption rests on the belief that such reactionaries are ultimately moving in the same direction as socialists, rather than being a dark reflection of socialism which satisfies parts of the project we promote while seeking to preserve the fundamental exploitative characteristics of capitalist-imperialism. To work with reactionaries while they are reactionaries is to merely be absorbed into a harmful current rather than redirect it.
What can be taken from these extreme inclusionists is the idea of meeting people where they are at. We are working in a deeply reactionary society, and it is necessary to expect this and be able to work with such material to push people away from this consciousness. However, meeting people where they’re at does not mean dropping all distinctions from popular conceptions. If we merely meet people where they’re at by adopting the exact same ideas as them, we lose any characteristics as a progressive, revolutionary socialist movement challenging the very foundations of capitalist society.
On the other hand, the extreme exclusionist faction depends heavily on morality, destruction of people, and dogmatism. They tend to reject dialogue on certain ideas on the basis of their knowing they’re incorrect, failing to understand that, for a mass movement, it is necessary to engage in dialogue with incorrect ideas where they are popular if we wish to ourselves become a popular element. This faction tends to reject redemption entirely, taking on a form of political engagement that is more talking at people than talking with them. To understand social reality, it is necessary to listen to people and ask them profound, engaging questions, respond to what they say rather than follow a scripted polemic.
This faction is motivated much more by morality than pragmatism, seeking to put into practice absolute principles rather than derive principles from reality as it stands, including the level of mass consciousness as it exists. This extends to the idea of ‘cancelling’. Expelling someone from a space or movement, sometimes termed ‘cancelling’, is not always undesirable. Some individuals are actively harmful to the cohesion of a movement, such as rapists, predators, and fascists.
This is not to say we should not engage at all with the ideas of reactionaries. To engage with society, we must understand it. To use a historical example, we would not want Georges Sorel — who began life as a conservative and ended it using socialism as a form for a fascist political content — to be part of our movement. When someone presents themselves as a socialist but fixates on reactionary concerns such as “SJWs” and “reverse racism,” especially when they have a reactionary background, we should not hold back from suspicion and the tool of exclusion when they are clearly unapologetic, unwilling to change, and bent on using socialism as a vehicle for reaction.
But we would want to be in dialogue with the ideas of such people as Georges Sorel, as critique is in itself part of dialogue. And critique of capitalist society is the root of socialism. This is not to say we must positively engage with all incorrect ideas. Rather, we should engage only with those which are socially relevant. Otherwise, we simply give free advertising to fringe opponents, who eat away at our prospective base.
However, exclusion on the basis of any harmful behavior, no matter how minute, loses sight of considering willingness to develop out of reactionary residue and to take an active part in the process of healing. Healing ought to be understood as a social process, one taken up to build and repair a community, not as something done by tearing out a splinter and leaving it at that. We must also remember that as an oppositional movement, we have little power over the powerful.
Cancelling does not affect the wealthy and influential. It affects only people who hold little power. Defaulting to it does little to refine a movement, as when we are a fringe element, it merely isolates us more and turns us into a sect. We must be realistic about our position as it stands.
The hard truth is that we must engage with flawed people (and no one is perfect), as we are ultimately seeking to become a socialist movement. Rather than exclude all flawed people, we should promote the negating of such flaws by addressing them in a manner which doesn’t destroy their presence entirely. We must engage with people as they are, while not rejecting critique. Transformation and re-integration are the tools necessary to build the seeds of a new future.
What we can ultimately learn from this exclusionist tendency is the need to retain distinctions from popular prejudices and to consistently assert our principles, while at the same time remembering that we ought to be asserting our principles in dialogue with people who are components of a reactionary society with a broadly reactionary social consciousness. We will not be able to change people decisively on a mass scale until we begin to revolutionize society on a mass scale. And we can only do this by becoming a genuinely revolutionary movement. A sect will never guide such material force, and instead is doomed to navel-gazing.
In engaging with the masses, we cannot take in absolute either of these approaches. Both in their own ways fail to be conversational. The inclusionists fail to be conversational in that they merely regurgitate talking points rather than refine and critique in a radical way. The exclusionists fail to be conversational in that they merely assert and fail to listen or even properly present critique to those being critiqued, often turning such critiques inward rather than building new relationships.
What, then, can being conversational be understood to mean? Rather than these two, it is to retain distinctions from popular conceptions and instead hold by the standards of communists as an advanced element, while at the same time linking up that radical critique and principled outlook with popular prejudices and ideas by engaging with people as they are. That is to say, we ought to be part of the masses instead of separate, but we ought to retain our standards. We shouldn't allow just anyone to waltz into our political community, disregarding even their most utterly reactionary positions and allowing them to deal damage to the cohesion of a revolutionary movement.
In his classic book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire gave an idea of this form of engagement:
The correct method for a revolutionary leadership to employ in the task of liberation is, therefore, not “libertarian propaganda.” Nor can the leadership merely “implant” in the oppressed a belief in freedom, thus thinking to win their trust. The correct method lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientizagdo.
The revolutionary leaders must realize that their own conviction of the necessity for struggle (an indispensable dimension of revolutionary wisdom) was not given to them by anyone else — if it is authentic. This conviction cannot be packaged and sold; it is reached, rather, by means of a totality of reflection and action. Only the leaders own involvement in reality, within an historical situation, led them to criticize this situation and to wish to change it.
Likewise, the oppressed (who do not commit themselves to the struggle unless they are convinced, and who, if they do not make such a commitment, withhold the indispensable conditions for this struggle) must reach this conviction as Subjects, not as objects. They also must intervene critically in the situation which surrounds them and whose mark they bear; propaganda cannot achieve this. While the conviction of the necessity for struggle (without which the struggle is unfeasible) is indispensable to the revolutionary leadership (indeed, it was this conviction which constituted that leadership), it is also necessary for the oppressed. It is necessary, that is, unless one intends to carry out the transformation for the oppressed rather than with them. It is my belief that only the latter form of transformation is valid.
Communists must make room for development and forgiveness, while not allowing our principles to be torn to shreds so that we end up a mass marketable brand that does not make uncomfortable challenges to reaction. We must limit our use of exclusion to where it is necessary to our cohesion as a movement.
The point of exclusion is not to damn someone and condemnation does not need to assume an inability of healing and development. The point is when a particular is no longer compatible with the general if the general is to survive in a healthy manner. We must refrain from excessive moralizing while refusing to fear critique and correction.
We must primarily focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment. In short, Western communists have a long way to go in learning to balance within the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, and we must be open to criticism and rectification.