Easy when you don’t have to actually run a state after a revolution and deal with all the sanctions, counter revolutions, etc. You can just shit on everything and call it ‘not real socialism’ or ‘revisionism’ from the comfort of your western, safe world. But it’s them doing it, your western superior view of socialism is irrelevant to their achievements.
The pure (libertarian) socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
One issue I see is that the language of progress – and I mean real progress, not tiny, crumb concessions – has been so abused by liberals that even a good leftist movement doing good work gets a ton of shit from leftist critics for not immediately smashing the full communism button.
Easy when you don’t have to actually run a state after a revolution and deal with all the sanctions, counter revolutions, etc. You can just shit on everything and call it ‘not real socialism’ or ‘revisionism’ from the comfort of your western, safe world. But it’s them doing it, your western superior view of socialism is irrelevant to their achievements.
One issue I see is that the language of progress – and I mean real progress, not tiny, crumb concessions – has been so abused by liberals that even a good leftist movement doing good work gets a ton of shit from leftist critics for not immediately smashing the full communism button.