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Notes for communist revolutionaries:
If you don't use an iron fist, your detractors will say you use an iron fist to crush dissent and they will manipulate the will of the people against you. After you fail and your supporters are rounded up and executed, they'll blame the failure on your ruthless authoritarianism.
If you use an iron fist, your detractors will say you use an iron fist to crush dissent, and you may lose favor among the people. You may find yourself doing questionable acts to hold onto power. However, you may actually succeed. Your detractors will say you are a ruthless authoritarian.
Sucks for the blood spilled in the second choice, but at least you'll have something to show for it when the dust settles
Your detractors will say you are a ruthless authoritarian.
To which we will reply: "My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right."
We are indeed authoritarians 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
Soon it transpired that such leniency was only undermining the strength of the authority of the Soviets. We committed a mistake in showing such leniency toward the enemies of the working class. If we repeated this mistake any further, we would have committed a crime toward the working class. We would have betrayed its interest. And this became perfectly clear very soon. It became very sure that the greater our leniency toward our enemies, the greater their resistance.
—Stalin (Interview by Emil Ludwig)
There is very much an experience of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" even in something as mild as trying to make a communist-sympathizing point on the internet. To some, there is nothing you can say that is considered valid. They decided you weren't worth listening to from the moment you said something that set off their McCarthy Communism Detector 5000 (TM). But they sure will pretend like they are interested in entertaining "debate" in spite of this, taking you down a path of wild generalizations and hypotheticals, while running away from anything factual you bring up about history that counters the narrative they've been told.
And that's not even getting into the people who are actively scheming against communism, as you are talking about. Some of it's plain people being tricked into thinking only in binary terms of good/evil, freedom/authority, and superimpose hypotheticals over reality.
I think of that saying that goes, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." But varied for the situation, "No liberalism survives contact with the enemy." Those who live by hypotheticals can only have control over hypotheticals. The imperialists of the world seem content to let them muck about with that, as it poses no material threat to their power on its own and can be misdirected into schools of thought that confuse and distract from what is happening.
This post really highlights my frustration with being a Marxist— I had a friend call me a conspiracy theorist when I explained to him what Banana Republics were and the coup in Nicaragua as an example of socialism “not working” because of outside forces. He constantly trolls me for being a communist and I demonstrate his lack of knowledge of history and philosophy, when he asks me for where I get my information he refuses to engage with the resources I send him. He refuses to understand that the dichotomy of American politics is a lie and thinks any third party left of the Democrats is useless and will be the same as the Democrats (well, we know why he is kind of right), and he keeps voting Democrat. He even told me I don’t know what liberal means, when I use it in the philosophical sense, and when I asked him if he knows what philosophical liberalism is (after claiming he took a political science class in college) he just choked up and didn’t answer the question.
Ever since I fully lost my liberal brain, it makes me want to punch walls when people bring up absolute nonsense or regurgitated propaganda about communism/Marxism and socialism. Even that, the vast majority of talking points can be used against capitalist countries tenfold. People will shit all over communism from 85 years ago when their country (USA in my case) was actually an apartheid state 85 years ago. I like to bring up that people like me (mixed race black and white) were illegal until 1968 and if you tried to make a law like that in the USSR they would have rightfully shot you at the time in the 1920s-30s (I use this with black friends who give me the common arguments against communism). Also, limiting of freedom of speech is a nonsense argument because liberal democracies constantly suppress narratives they don’t like. There’s just contradictions in everything that comes out of a liberal’s mouth.
I have begun to liken the development of communism with the development of the scientific method, as theory vs praxis with dialectic change, and how you can’t make arguments like above when the country you live in is static in nature and was worse socially.
These are very true words and even the reactions to this site show how true that is. Liberals will claim we’re authoritarian and crush dissent without a second thought. Then they go on to lie about our positions towards various marginalized groups and countries. Those in the echo chamber believe it and repeat every word while the more curious-minded second-guess what they hear and give it a look.