The left is far to divided and needs a central leader. The advantage the liberals and conservatives have are that their parties are not fractured. The two party system also prevents any way to win democratically so the only way to do this would be a revolution. But to have a revolution you must have the people on your side and Americans tend to look at a central leader like a president as the representation of a movement. How should we unite all of the different leftists under one leader so that there can be a united opposition. We also need to get more people to understand that currently America is not a true democracy and that the only way to fix this is with violence. Currently we need far more comrades like Luigi to remove the bourgeoisie with violence. If there are people with nothing left to lose some brave comrade should give them a weapon so they can do something.
For those of us living in the USA discussing theory won’t change anything. Only action will. United we will win, fractured we will fall.
You are jumping much too far ahead of the existing conditions. Your thinking is idealistic and detached from the material reality that exists in the US at the moment.
The US left, right now, needs to focus on educating and organizing the working class, not doing pointless adventurism, fetishizing violence when the masses do not yet support it, or LARPing as “leaders”. Revolutionary leaders aren’t self-appointed, they emerge organically through struggle as they are recognized by the masses. Do something for the masses first before you expect them to follow you.
Right now the US left is not united about what needs to be done, there is disagreement on the correct political line and the correct organizational strategy. And you won’t find the answer just by talking about it, you need to get out there, do the work, participate in the struggle alongside the working class, and learn through experience what works and what doesn’t. Win the support of the masses by standing up for the exploited and oppressed.
Find ways to help with labor struggles, help workers to form unions, convince them to join collective organizations for mutual aid and communal self-defense, help tenants to protect their rights against landlords. Don’t discount non-violent means of struggle. Help people without the means to do so to navigate the legal system. Organize protests, strikes and direct action against the fascist repression and the imperialist war machine.
And while you are doing these things continue to educate the people about capitalism and the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (don’t use fancy theory lingo that will alienate them, use words that they understand from their day to day lives), educate them about how the system really works, the mechanisms that are used to represses and exploit them. Raise their level of class consciousness.
Contradictions are already intensifying and material conditions will continue to deteriorate. This will open up opportunities to radicalize more people. Once the organized and revolutionary left has done all that work which i just spoke of, then the people will know that you are on their side and willing to fight for them. They will recognize those organizations and those leaders as their vanguard who have proven themselves as such.
Unity and centralization will emerge in the same way, through struggle against those ideological tendencies and those organizational strategies which are erroneous and don’t work. This struggle helps to correct your party line and hone your party discipline. In the meantime, form a united front with other working class organizations which share your goals, even when they don’t necessarily share your exact ideological line or your exact methods.
The reason why studying theory is important is because people have been through this before in the past. They have grappled with many of the same questions and problems. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel. You can learn from history what worked and what didn’t, lessons that were learned by others through great hardship and sacrifice, and then you must analyze your own conditions at the present time to understand what is applicable.
Why not just go underground?
Because that has a severe impact on your reach and your ability to continue build the revolutionary movement.
If the conditions force you to go underground then so be it. I strongly believe and i have said before that any anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist leftist organization must be prepared for that eventuality and expect it. But to self-impose that on yourself when the conditions have not yet reached the level of a revolutionary situation is to self-sabotage. Lenin spoke about these sorts of strategic choices and about recognizing when it is more advantageous to work within the system as opposed to outside of it.
Lenin wrote extensively about how to organize under conditions of harsh state repression, because that became a necessity for the Bolsheviks at some point. But there were also times when he advocated for communists to work within the bourgeois system. A vanguard party must know how to do both, but most importantly it must know how to correctly read the political situation and understand what the present conditions allow and call for.
And in fact, to some extent, a vanguard party can and should do both simultaneously. You can maintain your open and legal activities while also having cells organizing underground work with the necessary operational secrecy, provided that you properly insulate one from the other to maintain deniability and prevent the underground activities from being used as a pretext to shut down your legal operations. This is something that revolutionaries and resistance movements have always done.
Here are some works of Lenin that may help you understand this topic in greater detail:
The Illegal Party and Legal Work (1912)
Our Immediate Task (1899)
An Urgent Question (1899)
The Principal Stages in the History of Bolshevism (1920)
Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments? (1920)
The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats (1897)
And here is a compilation of Lenin’s views from dozens of different works:
Lenin - On Parliamentary Struggle
I find particularly Lenin’s early writings to be the most relevant when it comes to how to organize and what to prioritize at this very early stage of leftist revolutionary activity in the US and other imperial core countries. Because we have to admit that there is a long road still to go and we are only just at the beginning, and that we have not yet reached the sort of conditions that existed in Russia on the eve of the October Revolution, or even the first failed Russian Revolution of 1905.
If you want to gain more insight into how Lenin and other revolutionaries lived and worked during those early days i can also recommend perusing
Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of Lenin (1926)
But im saying the situation has already reached that point