the reddit party

A few months ago I vowed to never post here again. Here I am posting here again. So what is the occasion, how come shark has decided to bless you with an effortpost? The occasion is, in fact, the ICP, and more specifically the ICP which calls itself "old" when anyone says "which ICP". It also feels very appropriate to make a post on reddit about this whole situation as I think it's frankly bonkers and insane (the ICP situation is insane).

You are likely aware of the relaunch of r/leftcommunism, now proudly "moderated by militants of the International Communist Party". International Communist Party is an organization I have personally had some experience with, in fact, as you might have noticed if you stalked me online in the last 3 or so years, I was a sympathizer of it and at some point even a member (seriously!). My work with the party before and after the split constituted translations of the english texts into russian, I have translated maybe like 20 or so texts in the ~2 years I was doing work with the ICP. Some of these I just didn't bother to send, some are unfinished and some are published on the site. Being a sympathizer granted me the ability to actually respond to the so tired and usual "but what have YOU done" which "praxis"-obsessed flavors of modernizers and falsifiers so enjoy saying, indeed I felt quite proud of so wittily responding with an "I'm a member of the international communist party".

While I was a sympathizer you might remember me being in control over r/leftcommunism, it was a subreddit which I did quite enjoy moderating and perfecting as much as I could. In fact the subreddit even was semi-affiliated with the party, though definitely less to the extent it is now lmao, you could say it was an initiative some of the members and sympathizers had, but that's really it. I think the center wasn't even aware of its existence until a few months in, at which point it already caused some issues within the party. The subreddit was mostly my personal project - quite literally everything you saw on there, from the automod config to the subreddit's appearance, was done by me personally, even the reading list they have now (from which they scrubbed my name (totally not mad about this)).

Eventually, after some deliberation and after talking with some members way smarter and way more experienced than me, we (that is to say me, vrm, some of the other mods affiliated with the ICP) decided to close it. The reason was that it had become too affiliated with the party, mfs were straight up getting recruited on there, which is fucking insane if you think about it for a second. I remember I would be getting a DM from someone "interested in joining" every once in a while, like there are multiple people who are sympathizers in part because of me, actually suicide inducing to think about.

Indeed the party was originally quite hostile to their presence on reddit, imagine if people started to make posts and comments from your name and had it plastered on their reddit flair like they know what the fuck you are thinking of, now imagine the same feeling but you're the only genuine proletarian party on earth. During the split, reddit was brought up, the "old" party was in fact the "pro-reddit" one, while the splitters, aka now the intcp dot org, were against it. If you are extremely funny you could come up with some witty one-liner about how the party split over reddit. You wouldn't be as incorrect as I wish you would be. I feel somewhat responsible for all of this shit, hence the post.

The subreddit, right now, is intended for q&a posts, the same sort of stuff which it was intended for before. If you're familiar with maoism you could draw some parallels with this and their "mass line". At the same time let's not pretend like this subreddit isn't mainly actually meant for recruitment. When I was its moderator, that shit was accidental, I swear on my life I didn't want it to end up like it did, at the same time though, frankly, I should have known better, but I was literally 17 so give me some slack. This is what happens when a clueless student who gets radicalized online thinks of themself as an authentic revolutionary. Right now this is the official position of the ICP - that is, they are actively trying to recruit some random redditors into their ranks. You could, for example, say that they have "launched a recruitment campaign" and are trying to "grow through any means in a situation where there is no struggle". First as a tragedy and all.

I'm sure the members of the "old" party will find this post upsetting and I'm sure they are going to attempt to disparage me and my claims against them, indeed this post is quite offensive, especially if you are the sort of organization which cares about the opinions of people who post to r/ultraleft, and even more so if you are familiar with my other posts, like the one where I said "never talk about the ICP on ultraleft", and especially even more when you consider that the sort of person currently reading this post is literally their target demographic (that is to say, NOT proletarians). Personally though, I have lost any sort of respect I have had for that organization, talking about them on this shitty subreddit just feels appropriate, they are now absolutely no better or worth any more respect than the ICT or the ICC, or in fact any other "left communist" group, this isn't any better than the il programmite nonsense where they were recruiting students on university campuses, in fact it is even worse and even more pathetic. This is a race to the bottom and I've been there multiple times and now I don't have the will or wish to cope anymore, I don't need to "defend" anyone and especially I do not hold any allegiance to the reddit party.

I wish the "old" party a wonderful degeneration and I hope anyone who is as repulsed at this as me will find better shit to do.