In the misbegotten days of my youth when I was a flaming Maoist, one of the rituals was criticism/self-criticism—or, among insiders, crit/self-crit. Each comrade was supposed to subject themselves to group criticism at meetings’ end and also to fess up to their own transgressions. The ritual was more benign than it sounds: you might be criticized for not tying your sneaker laces (it was before untied sneakers were chill), and you might self-criticize yourself for the petty-bourgeois deviation of never having learnt how to tie them. Still, it would be wrongheaded to dismiss the notion of criticism/self-criticism. In a mass movement of the have-nots committed to radical change, possessing a firm grasp on truth is a critical weapon in our arsenal. Those holding the levers of power can afford to make and repeat errors. They have ample resources—money, media, raw force—to compensate for poor judgment. Indeed, it is largely our grasp on truth that compensates for all our other (inevitable) deficits: truth is a powerful weapon for winning over public opinion, and it enables us to husband our scarce resources, not squander them on committing and repeating errors. But it’s impossible to get a handle on truth until and
— source normanfinkelstein.com | Norman Finkelstein | Jan 6, 2023