the most famous opponent¶

Lenin is quite possibly the most famous opponent of "Electoralism! Compromise! Coalitions!" ever. The Bolsheviks were legendary for their refusal to cede ground to even the Mensheviks -- whose platform of "we need to work with our enemies" was an utter failure. https://t.co/GiooRpXnFA You could have gone with Mao, who worked with the KMT, first to defeat the warlords, and then later to beat back the imperial invaders. Or Stalin, who did the same with the western powers to defeat the Nazis. I wonder why you don't see those two as Good Examplars of Compromise 🤔 Does it have anything to do with their "authoritarian" reputations, refusing to dilute their principles in the name of "unity"? Do you maybe hate Stalin and Mao more than you hate reactionaries, and only cite "leftist heroes" as long as you can contort them to your own project? Could it possibly be that your urge to compromise and collaborate is only applied in one direction, and you only exhort people to "work with" the most regressive tendencies, but abhor anyone holding revolutionary politics? I call this "lobster trap unity." You are called upon to crawl to the right, through a narrow tunnel, to reach an imagined "broad coalition" a bait you can smell just out view. If you still find yourself outside that coalition, you just have to keep crawling until you find it. If you bothered to look behind you as you crawled, you'd notice that the walls of the tunnel are covered in spikes pointed inward, preventing you from backtracking. And when at last you land in the middle of the trap, you'll find that the tunnel entrance can no longer be reached. Our job as communists -- not "leftists," never that vague embrace of "not as far right as we could be" -- is to bring people to us. We don't hide who we are and we don't compromise on our principles to win popularity contests, even rhetorically. Ours is the ideology of liberation, plain and simple. Trans liberation is just as central to our mission as indigenous liberation, black liberation, women's liberation, and the liberation of ALL oppressed peoples and classes. We win by standing by those principles at all times. We have absolutely no room in our movement for anyone who sees that as a dealbreaker, and no need to contort ourselves to fit their movement. The majority being against us is a facile construct from the context we are currently in, not an inmate feature of "the masses." Unite all that can be united. That is the only basis for a liberation movement. We have very few true enemies among the people -- and when we stand firm, those rare few will recuse themselves from unifying with us.