How do people deal with left-leaning liberals that see that capitalism is leading to the inevitable destruction of human society, even recognize Israel is committing genocide, and other progressive opinions but refute every revolution or revolutionary action. The “communism won’t work because human nature”, “the USSR was communist”, “(Stalin|Mao|Castro) killed x million but the US killed 5,000 in industrialization”, state dept. parrots. How do people talk with those that get so close but refute any praxis. I know this topic has been discussed before and links to other talking points would be good.
My path to communism was pretty weird, I was initially interested in FOSS and the open code movement in general. That led me to Lemmy, so I was looking into the code and found Dessalines, one of the two founders of Lemmy. He has made a collection of essays aiming to educate people about what Marxism and Communism is and clearing up lots of the western propaganda and talking points. This eventually led me here, and from there I have been steadily becoming more and more ML.
Before this I was a left leaning lib. I knew about communism but I believed the bullshit I was fed by the false history I was taught and media like 1984. I think most people would be relatively agreeable to the ideas of Marxist thought if they weren’t being mindwashed about it, and reading theory is important to get through the hard parts like why armed revolution is necessary and why the oppression of the bourgeois class is needed while the class war exists.
I’m guessing a lot of us patched together some kind of proto leftist beliefs from reading random Stallman quotes and saying fuck Comcast, fuck the fourteen eyes security agreement, let me buy research chemicals and watch movies for free
The war crimes list is a very poweful radicalization tool but as a guy who has been obsessed with vetting the entire Trueanon subreddit reading list (why do they have Legacy of Ashes in there? go fuck yourselves) & almost every book about “parapolitics” I’ve seen mentioned on Twitter…
It engenders a feeling of helplessness that is difficult to ignore. Poor critique of imperialism, wallows in the memory of US triumphs over tiny peripheral countries. Lacks a critique of Sovietism (I had trouble with this because I became obsessed with anticommunist historians like Simon Sebag Montefiore)
I like how Desalines has gone back and added stuff about international dollar institutions like the World Bank and IMF. Actually that reminds me to write a thing about how everyone’s pensions and retirement savings are used to bludgeon global south countries