Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 3 months agoNobody 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 why/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
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
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.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Suppression of the right were 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 labeled
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.
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
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.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Yes, that’s why I recommended The Jakarta Method, it details exactly what the outcome looks like when the left doesn’t repress the right and instead lets the sabotage and organize. It’s really an important book because you can see echos of the methods in South Korea under the dictatorship, Taiwan during the white terror, Pinochet’s Chile, Uruguay even before the '73 coup, etc.
If you believe this, you do not know the scale and details of capitalist repression.
Literally no Marxist would call any AES project Utopian, except as a pejorative.
Here’s a pamphlet differentiating Utopian and Scientific Socialism It’s not an easy read due to being from 1880.