The constant cycle of post-modernist and intersectionalist organization is one in which the extremely atomized organizations that attempt the entelechy of totalization through disaggregation run into their own existential limitations, because their foundational premise takes particularity as the irreducible unit of political reality, which means any expansion of scope has to materialize via accumulating distinct realities like a stamp collection, rather than synthesizing them. The partial unions they engage in among themselves only remain together for as long as the context applies increasing pressure, because the logic of their basic existence is incompatible with unifying programs and struggle. That would require subordinating the particular to a shared political line, which their organizational form structurally precludes. When the pressure recedes, the coalition disaggregates back into its components and the cycle resumes. The process of disaggregation is harmful too, in that the experience of attempted coalition forces each constituent group into compromises and conflicts that their own foundational logic reads as inadequate representation of the particular, generating grievances that reinforce the starting premise of atomization. The cycle resumes with a further entrenched atomization, and with the principle of unity discredited by partial coalitions that presented themselves as attempts at unity.
It's worth noting that these coalitions only stand because of the contextual, punctual pressures that motivate them. These coalitions, at least the notable and relatively durable ones, spring because of contextual demands and not primarily as a result of the programmatic advances within these organizations and their congealment. It's an un-explicit manifestation of the demands that reality places under the surface on political organization, the demand to organize as wide, as deep and as conjugates as reality itself is. The push from objective conditions runs into conflict with the subjective limitations of their organizational philosophy and it fails when a synthesis inevitably can't be reached by adding on programs and initialisms
this is a necessary critique to raise each time the cycle bears itself out, but i think that it's misleading to present the breakdown that occurs as one-sidedly harmful. we have to ask: what is the class character of these sectional campaign groups that glob together their 'listen to [x] voices' / 'stay in your lane' / 'diversity of tactics' / 'interlocking systems of oppression' politics (and the narrow interests of specific trade union establishments, which have joined quite easily with 'anti-oppression' politics!) into an eclectic, accumulated totality during moments of heightened struggle? by their nature they are reformist; their demands are directed to the existing authorities and against intolerable particulars 'in the meantime' before the overthrow of capitalism; they receive particular forms of oppression as transhistorical; they do not grasp the totality of capitalism as a global system which makes transformational, creative, active use of all historical forms of oppression for its own social reproduction; they hold subjectivist positions on who it is that can make historical change occur. empirical investigation will confirm what is obvious from these political characteristics -- that they are led by the labour aristocracy in the imperialist nations through trade unions and political parties that seek alliances with the imperialist bourgeoisie, by the petit and national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations, by bourgeois and petit bourgeois women and gays, and everywhere by the clergy, as well as by students, who are in turn led by bourgeois academics without realizing it. even in the movements against austerity and poverty which appear 'working class' through a crude 'income=class' lens, this can be seen from the demands for cheaper prices for food, housing, medicine etc rather than higher wages, full employment and so on, appealing in fact to the economic problems of the lower petit bourgeoisie, managers, union staffers, and so on, in addition to appealing to national citizenship as a basis for state-funded benefits. but if we look lower & deeper than the leadership of any of these organizations, we can find everywhere, to greater and lesser degrees of representation, workers, who are simply not yet conscious as a class for ourselves. as marx & engels put it in the context of the bourgeois revolutions of the mid-18th century:
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies [...] The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
and, imo, so it is today that the increasing dissolution and mutual suspicion of these sectional organizations after each cycle of discontent is not essentially harmful, but is only an appearance of the ongoing existential decay of all the middle classes during a period of heightening imperialist competition, including the dissolution of some sections into the working class. it is also an appearance of the working class's ongoing loss of faith in (and desertion from) their existing mis-leadership. a clear analysis of this matters because it clarifies the role and the tasks of the working class in general and would-be communists specifically. so rather than harmful i would say: a political crisis that can be leveraged either by the forces of revolution (and who are these?) or reaction. this places more demands and responsibility onto us (and creates that 'us'), rather than placing blame onto those movement leaders we think are doing a bad job
