This isn’t to say our community hasn’t grown in positive ways. But during struggle sessions particularly, very few people are converted, and many people, potential comrades, are shed from the community due to hostility (some deservedly, but many not). The bulk of the convincing and understanding happens in the more comradely discussions before and after a struggle sesh. This isn’t to say we should tolerate the whinging of people who do not share our fundamental convictions or refuse to be comradely themselves, but I see convincing people of the correctness of our ideas as an investment of effort and love into fellow comrades, and a recognition of their potential, and hostility and berating as fundamentally saying they are not worth our effort. Its no one person’s responsibility to baby step people here into more correct views, but for those with the patience to do so, it is usually a worthwhile endeavor, and uncomradely hostility makes it much harder to do.

One relevant section:

Two common mistakes are made in seeking the correct relationship between unity and struggle. One mistake is to emphasize unity at all costs. People who fall into this position fail to make a correct distinction between allies and enemies, or between working-class and ruling-class ideology. As a result, they seek to smooth over differences. They think that any struggle is bad, instead of seeing the difference between principled struggle, which is necessary to advance the movement, and dogmatic factionalism. This position often springs from the fear that “someone might feel bad” if a struggle goes on, or from an opportunist desire to maintain a vague, unprincipled alliance. In either case, the fear of struggle usually boils down to the fear that things will be messy for me if the struggle gets hot. This kind of liberalism arises from narrow self-interest, from thinking about what is good for oneself or a small group, and not about what is good for the whole movement.

The other mistake is to emphasize struggle at all costs. Some people struggle for unity based on absolute unanimity, because they see anything less as a form of unprincipled compromise. These dogmatists generally define unity as “the identical interpretation of the revolutionary classics.” They often spend most of their time dueling with quotations, and seldom venture into the messy real world. They fail to see that theory is meant to illuminate the problems which spring up in the course of changing the world, and that intellectual work can only be correct and valuable when it is accompanied by the practice necessary for a deep understanding of concrete conditions. Rather than pursuing the dialectical progression of unity-struggle-transformation, they proceed from unity to splinter group to fizzle. Their criticism and self-criticism comes out like “trash and self-trash,” because they confuse care with softness and patience with liberalism. They forget Mao’s words that “to treat comrades like enemies is to go over to the side of the enemy.”

Mao calls the process of building unity among comrades “carrying out the work of one struggle and two helps.” Unless criticism is practiced with the sincere desire to reach unity, he says, “It is no good. It is nothing more than knocking each other down. Which is better, one more or one less (working together for the revolution)? It is better to have more people and mobilize every conceivable factor.”