I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
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You guys don’t even hide it anymore. You’re openly advocating for brutal police regimes. The jokes write themselves. Convenient.
You don’t get to call directing state power against the petite bourgeoisie a brutal police regime when your government is supporting the most brutal dictatorships in Africa, whose violence is directed at the working class.
Yeah I get to do that, because that’s what happened factually, sorry. No amount of whataboutism will change that. I don’t care about Western imperialists, fuck them too.
The vital context is wielding state power against internal threats. Which literally every state must do to continue to exist. It’s not whataboutism to point out that the state you currently live in is currently doing far worse, for far worse reasons in a context where your criticism can only be used for anticommunism.
Would you say it’s constructive for an Israeli to be critical of gay rights in Palestine? Of course not, because divorced of context, it only carries water for imperialism
The problem is the violence of the totalitarian regimes you defend harms innocents too, which is why serious communists shouldn’t advocate for that kind of power abuse any more than they should advocate for Western imperialism. It’s not that hard.
Nobody is advocating power abuse. One of the books I try to get people to read, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia contextualizes the scale of and how such abuses occurred in a much more useful criticism than “communism bad Stalin evil, that’s why you can’t ever do anything about rightists organizing against the state”.
A good accompaniment to illustrate what it looks like and what the consequences are when the left fails to take appropriate action once in power is The Jakarta Method
That’s precisely the extent of my criticism. Understanding stalinism instead of just demonizing it is a good thing, if only to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But the end doesn’t justify the means. Apologism is not OK.
It’s OK to take a stance against power abuses, and vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.
Suppression of the right was necessary, however the relative freedom given to locals to carry it out resulted in people using it to settle old scores or non-ideological people to advance politically within the party. While dekulization enabled them, those actions were orthogonal (and actually hindered) the aims of dekulization.
Whether that can be considered justification or apologia isn’t constructive IMO. Personally though, I just consider it an error in the way it was carried out.
Similar issues (and resulting sentiments) are observed in the wake of Mao giving villages the freedom to set up their own courts and try landlords and others.
We had that struggle back when Kruschev sent the tanks into Hungary and every western leftist org was falling over each other to denounce the USSR. Meanwhile nazis were being put in charge of police forces in South America to do crimes against humanity against indigenous and communist elements and hundreds of thousands were being massacred in South Korea.
Turns out the tankies were right. Denouncing the enemies of the state you live in just serves to carry water for imperialism.
By using the kind of the repression they used on the public, they proved they were no better than the capitalists they despise so much.
Someone that actually cares about left-wing politics cares a lot more about the outcomes than which faction comes ahead. Politics aren’t a game of Risk. Actions have consequences, and humanity as a whole loses when innocents get killed by brainwashed idiots.
If stalinist Russia is what utopia is supposed to be, I’m not interested, thank you.
Equality has never in the history of our species been given freely by the ruling class to the workers. It has always been taken after violent struggle, and after the initial struggle is over the working class must be willing to defend their gains else they will lose them.
I acknowledge that. But what “struggle” means is not an unimportant detail. And I disagree with the Stalinist approach viscerally, and it isn’t in accordance with leftist values by any stretch of the imagination.