Western “leftists” often fall into a trap. In this trap, they get to announce the necessity of organizing for class consciousness without actually doing any labor work, political education work, or even joining an organization. In this trap, they get to announce solidarity with the global working class and say damning things about the worst imperialist excesses, but also get to retain the chauvinism of their imperialist upbringing, never actually doing anything to challenge their own countries’ component of the imperial core while attacking imperialists’ designated enemies. As no political project is without faults, but their idea of socialism is free of faults, they are bestowed a license to condemn every movement that wins a revolution and tell them to be more like those that never even get off the ground (the pure, clearly faultless ones).

Interestingly, people can fall into this trap because they refuse to educate themselves at all or because they spend all of their time diving deeply into a canon of purity and fail to have historical context or real-world experience in struggle. There are so many Western “Marxists” that have not read Capital in any form. There are also many Western “Marxists” that exclusively consume cloistered trade unionist or Trotskyist or MLM sources, failing to self-apply the criticism that they gleefully throw at “campists” and “revisionists”. Consequently, they follow an idealist path, and this is most evident in their attempts to organize, or lack thereof. Most don’t really do anything at all, they just read and pick fights. But when they do attempt organizing work, these are the people who overly congratulate themselves on a job well done for doing, more or less, nothing, or doing something embarrassingly incompetently, or losing, or just plain acting against our shared interests. For example, the “Marxist” paid trade unionist that spends half their time promoting imperialist party candidates and the other half trying to make jobs making bombs for genocide pay better. That person thinks of themselves as a true revolutionary and in the same breaty that they defend a concentration on facilitating class traitorism they will tell you that it is bad to defend the Palestinian resistance.