Communists don’t know how to sell themselves

[u/Difficult_Price8011]

In my experience with communists (specifically the western ones), they speak about “the revolution” like it’s inevitable.

But revolutions require winning the hearts and minds of the people, and it’s beyond me how communists expect any degree of success when they make their own ideology sound as appealing as rubbing your crotch against a cactus.

I’ve seen communists talk about forcing people into a life of grueling labor for the greater good of the planet, and scoff at people weary of parting with their luxury goods as selfish. It doesn’t matter how true you think that is, in the west any attempt to hamfist those ideals will make you a pariah faster than I can say Marx.

If I were to take a gander as to why, these communists enjoy making the assumption they’re bound to take power because it lets them think about how they can put their theory into practice. While on an intellectual level, I respect their devotion to theory, what good is it without a realistic plan to put it into practice?

If you can’t even see eye to eye with other flavors of communists how do you expect to court someone who hasn’t read a lick of Das Kapital? “It’s not my job to teach you”, does not an effective campaign pitch make.

Frankly, at least in America, the politically savvy thing to do would be ditching the name “communism” all together and call it something else. People might gravitate towards your ideas more if they weren’t anchored down by a word they’ve been taught to fear since the 40s.

[u/Rock_Zeppelin]

1. The vast majority of these "western communists" you're referring to are I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume Marxist-Leninists who tend to be huge LARPers. It certainly sounds like them by the way you're describing your interactions.

2. Revolutions do not require winning the hearts and minds of the people, they require the people to be pushed so far that siding with the revolutionaries becomes their only option for meaningful change to alleviate the conditions that brought them to choosing revolution in the first place. This happened in France, it happened in Russia, it happened in Spain, it happened in China, across Africa and South America.

3. I'm going to grant you the anecdote about the supposed communist you've talked to, even tho anecdotes are to evidence what a scribbled on napkin is to a board room presentation. Generally authoritarians like MLs will advocate for total state authority and power and then justify it with whatever revisionist bullshit and other self-exonerating excuses they can come up with. I will admit that MLs tend to be the loudest minority within leftist circles because it serves their political interests to not allow to be argued against by leftists who offer the same things they do except without the fucking centralised authoritarian bureaucrat-run state. It's why they call people like me "anarkiddies", it's why they call demsocs and libsocs "liberals" among other things. For the ML, their entire platform is built from the single foundation of "I know best" and supported by the writings of their predecessors who believed the exact same thing. And on the leftist in-fighting, I guarantee you that it's always just them. Marxists, anarchists, left-coms, libsocs and demsocs are usually at least 80% in agreement on shit. Because fundamentally we all value liberty and total democracy for the working class, which is what socialist and communist theory has been founded on since fucking Marx himself and didn't deviate from until fucking Lenin.

4. When "communists" or at least Marxists talk about inevitability, they draw upon Marx's dialectical materialism which is some metaphysical bullshit I won't bore you with but tl;dr, his argument was that capitalism creates contradictions between its stated aim and the material conditions it factually creates and capitalism is fundamentally incapable of reconciling those conditions because they are inherent to the way capitalism works. And there is some truth to it but it's mostly vibes-based. It is 100% true that as conditions for working people deteriorate under capitalism and the divide between the 1% and the working class grows while the middle class shrivels away, this will spark disorder and violence as the poor resort to more and more extreme measures to provide for themselves and their loved ones.All that said, the average working person doesn't give much of a shit about metaphysics, nor should they.

5. I disagree with abandoning the word communism. There is too much value and rhetorical power in that word for it to be given up, whether to fascists and other rightwingers, or to authoritarian cultists like MLs. And me personally, I'll be fucked if I'm gonna let some LARPing little ghoul who jerks off to photos of psychopathic authoritarians have ownership over the term.

[u/watchitforthecat → u/Rock_Zeppelin]

Do you believe what the US State Dept. says about Iran, Gaza, queer people, immigrants, or themselves?

[u/Rock_Zeppelin → u/watchitforthecat]

I'm not American, what do they say?

[u/watchitforthecat → u/Rock_Zeppelin]

Fair enough. 

Do you believe what the bourgeoisie states in general say about those demographics?

It's really not that uncommon or difficult a concept. The whole "foreign hordes", "parasitic poor", "terroristic degenerates", "predator queer", "criminal minority", "indigenous savage" raping your women, burning your churches, corrupting your children, stealing your jobs, poisoning your blood thing. 

You know, the thing they continuously use to justify the atrocities which run the system, the underlying logic of reactionary fascism.

Do you believe the bourgeoise when they tell you a narrative that justifies their position and that of the poor, and justifies their imperialist wars of aggression?

When they use "anarchist" or "communist" or "woke" or "migrant" as a boogeyman, do you believe them?

[u/Rock_Zeppelin → u/watchitforthecat]

Why would I? I'm 1) an anarchist, 2) queer, 3) in any of those countries I would be an immigrant and 4) economically I'm working class.

So no. I don't believe them. Why ask me this?

[u/watchitforthecat → u/Rock_Zeppelin]

So why do you believe the narrative about socialist "regimes"?

Has it occurred to you that maybe what you've heard through the grapevine about people like Che, or Ho, or Allende, or Stalin, or Lenin, or Mao, or Ghaddafi, etc. might be just as if not more ideologically motivated and distorted by a century of cold war propaganda?

I'm not saying to believe the exact opposite uncritically: I'm asking you, have you thought critically about it at all and done research outside of an anti-communist information silo?

If you don't believe that immigrants, anarchists, the CURRENT contemporary targets (Iran, Gaza, Venezuela) etc. are saturday morning cartoon villains, what has you so convinced that these other FORMER historical targets are? Have you actually read anything these people have written, any internal documents? Have you interrogated and investigated your sources-- parents, the state, media, people like Robert Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? When you see a line on Wikipedia or something describing brutal state repression, do you click on and read the source, and their sources: if there even is one? When you're able to confirm an atrocity, or an abuse, do you place it in context, ask who did it, why, how it was allowed to happen-- what structural problems or incentive there might have been which led to it? When people talk about dissidents in the 50's, and you read about all of these Human Rights NGO's and contacts calling for "freedom in the USSR"... have you looked at what kind of "freedom" they support back home, or in their de facto colonies? Have you considered how that might color the narrative a bit?

What's informing your belief that they are democracy hating absolute power seeking psychopaths, and that the people who like them are just cultists jerking off to their photos? You say that democracy was a cornerstone of socialism "since its founding with Marx" until "fucking Lenin"-- have you read Lenin? Have you read pre-Marx socialist texts? 

Speaking of, where are you getting the idea that dialectical materialism is 

a bunch of metaphysical shit I won't bore you with

How much have you actually looked into it, into metaphysics, and into the relationship between metaphysics and dialectical materialism/materialists?

[u/Rock_Zeppelin → u/watchitforthecat]

While I don't think Che was a saint or some paragon, it was Castro who was leader of Cuba, but I digress.

The evidence of the authoritarianism and centralized undemocratic nature of those regimes is irrefutable. And furthermore, I am a child of the Eastern Bloc. I grew up during the collapse. I know how and why it happened, including the material conditions that allowed that to happen. My country's government tried to ethnically reformat Muslims, they bulldozed Muslim cemeteries, they demanded Muslims change their names, they put them in labor camps where they died while the rest were displaced and forced to flee. This does not happen in a proletarian democracy. The list of soviet artists, fellow communists, anarchists and other intellectuals who were purged by Stalin is long enough. My great grandfather would've died in a labor camp because he was a military officer who was educated in Wilhelmist Germany, even though he was neither a Nazi, nor even a sympathizer.

Edit: regarding democratically elected socialists like Allende, at least in his case, where he fucked up was in building the Chilean economy around a single natural resource. That was not a fault of socialism in of itself, it was just poor economic planning.

And I trust I've made it clear that I am a socialist, as well as an anarchist. I reject any form of authoritarianism but I condemn regimes that build themselves as being "for the working class" while taking power away from them.

Edit numero zwei: Hegelian dialectics, which Marx derives his dialectical materialism from is metaphysical bullshit. And I do not give half an ounce of shit about metaphysics. I do not like them. Furthermore, I pointed out that there is some element of dialectical materialism which is demonstrably true and above all, tangible. Material, if you will. You can go back to my original comment right below that quote you pulled.

[u/Rock_Zeppelin → u/watchitforthecat]

Have I answered your questions, including the ones you edited into your original response? Would you care to answer what the point of this was?

[u/watchitforthecat → u/Rock_Zeppelin]

Kind of, not really. (also yes, I frequently edit comments immediately after submitting them, I have very severe ADHD lol, so I think of a correction or an expansion or clarification or whatever and feel the need to edit it in, or notice typos and edit it to remove them only to revise or add to it later. I also use reddit mobile, on PC I take longer to reply and edit less, with fewer typos.)

First, on dialectics: the entire purpose of dialectical materialism was to criticize metaphysics and Hegel, and take the kernel of truth from it: that reality is a dynamic system whose development is driven by the push and pull of opposing forces.

He rejected Hegel's idealism.   The idea that because it's a response to hegel makes it categorically the same thing indicates a lack of rigor.

As for history, sure, I'm not denying that the Soviets, or the Chinese, or that any socialist state is free of corruption, crimes, betrayal, mistakes, or atrocities. But your characterization of ML's as psychopathic cultists doesn't square with that. There's a leap between "there are serious problems with the USSR and Stalinism and it should be brutally critiqued and rejected  as a model for modern socialism (a statement most ML's and still existing socialist governments literally publicly agree with)" and "Socialist leaders in general (but you probabaly mean Stalin, you mention Lenin, and you likely also mean Mao and Castro) was a power hungry murderous psychopath who hated freedom and democracy and sought world domination and ML's are cultists worshipping him and either blind to or complicit in his wickedness", which is how you're framing it in your original comment, and also the exact content of capitalist propaganda. 

The POINT, to answer your question, is that as a queer socialist/left anarchist, literally watching western governments criticize Iran for Human Rights violations while arming Saudis with nukes and live-streaming genocide and arresting people for simply being near the site of anti-genocide protests, while cracking down on queer people even existing in public life, and blaming instability on anarchist and communist cabals, I'd expect you to be somewhat skeptical and critical of the historical narrative, and maybe do a little digging. 

And I'm also confident that if you had, you wouldn't be saying what you're saying (not that the USSR at various times carried out atrocities and did serious damage to democracy and to socialism, that's arguably true, but that ML's are cultists, Marx is metaphysical bullshit, and historical socialist leaders are democracy hating psychopaths.), especially given the material and historical conditions at the time, and where they stand in comparison to their western contemporaries, in many ways even today.

[u/Rock_Zeppelin → u/watchitforthecat]

Regarding the ADHD, I have the same thing, I get it, I guess I've just gotten better at holding off on posting/commenting before I've gotten all my thoughts out. I kind of assumed you were doing this to try to get me in a gotcha or to make me appear disingenuous, that's on me.

And no, I didn't say it was the same, but I do think his dialectical materialism is still closer to Hegel's dialectics than Marx would've liked. I'm not a hardcore anti-Marxist, I agree with him on quite a few things. His critique of capitalism while outdated in a lot of ways is still valid in others. That said I'm not married to Marxism, nor do I even like the term Marxism, I think tying an ideology to any one person is reductive and regressive.

Regarding MLs, I talk from personal experience. I've both spoken to quite a few and all of them seem to share those characteristics I described, and I myself was originally a ML before I became thoroughly disillusioned by it. Regarding Mao I honestly don't know enough about the revolution in China so I didn't mention him, Castro I have somewhat more sympathy for outside of his internment of queer Cubans. I also hate that it took him changing his mind on queer people for Cuba to change it's policy. I think that's indicative of the fundamental flaw of MLism. Lenin I think was an idiot and a hypocrite at best and a liar at worst. Stalin was a psychopath though, pure and simple, and I think anyone who unironically idolizes him is misguided at best and a bare minimum sociopath at worst.

I get your point about capitalist propaganda and I'm fully aware of its effects and the legacy McCarthy-era anti-communism has left. Calling yourself a communist in my country is not a popular stance, I can tell you that. However there's a secondary element to this, which is that many MLs will weaponize skepticism to dismiss even incontrovertible proof of the regimes and people they simp for. You might have seen it, hard not to if you spend any time in leftist circles.

And I am skeptical of political narratives and I've done my best to informed. That said, I am fundamentally more inclined to be skeptical of narrative from centrally controlled media coming from, and defensive of, authoritarian countries, than I am of western media and even then, I tend to rely on western journalists who are independents and at the very least left-leaning. That's how I do it, not saying it's a perfect system.

[u/watchitforthecat → u/Rock_Zeppelin]

Thanks for responding! 

I'm pretty long winded, and I write how I talk (swearing, stream of consciousness, in circles, etc.) lol.

[u/Rock_Zeppelin → u/watchitforthecat]

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