i go out of my way to experience different cultures and it seems like the immigrant communities in the united states originating from communist countries tend to be some of the chuddiest people imaginable. chinese, russian, cuban, vietnamese. literally every person who i ever talked to that has lived in a communist country and then moved to the united states, or is like second or third generation from that, tends to be incredibly reactionary and anti communist. i feel like i am a more well versed communist when talking to people that lived in a communist country.
its like that everyone that comes to the united states from a communist country forgets the values of marxism, socialism, and communism. i have been too polite to ask what really made these people move to this fucking shithole and if i had to guess they have something severely wrong with them and they want to participate in some small business tyrany and become capitalists. like all these assholes be chasing the dollar and they bring great shame on their own nationality even being here.
i have had much better discussions with people from countries that are still being exploited by capitalists since they already have an understanding of what colonialism and capitalism even is and they arent here to try to become small business owners or worse. people from puerto rico dont got the brain worms that cuban expats do for example.
and i should mention, they all state, they love their country but they blame everything bad with their country on communists. It infuriates me hearing these people, who were born in a nation with socialized healthcare, state controlled industry, basic welfare for citizens, just trash talk the system that make them so successful in the first place and gave them the resources they probably didn't deserve to open up a shitty restaurant selling borscht. they would know exactly why these social programs cant meet demand if they just took the blindfold off and realized that america, the great fucking satan, is the reason why the global economy is so unequal ITS ALL BECAUSE OF FUCKING AMERICA NOT COMMUNISM YOU STUPID FUCK!
ive been told not to view myself as more communist than others, but i fucking am around these parts with expats who are not communist whatsoever, that makes me more communist than them. if i was to draw a hundred mile radius around myself odds are there probably wouldnt be someone more communist than me. nobody in my life reads theory, every fucking time i tried reaching out with dsa or the bernie shit i have only met shitlibs, i have found no comrades in bipoc communities, the lgbt, religion, or labor. just having someone say to me face to face they are a communist would help me anchor my belief system to something real and not entirely made up and on the internet.
idk, communism is basically what i use to fill my god hole and its fucking hard to find communists irl and its real shitty that people from communist countries arent oftentimes communists. i just want some validation in my belief in communism by someone who is fucking real.
My conclusion is that just because you lived in a socialist country doesnt mean youre smart or understand socialism or geopolitics. Im friends with a lot of Venezuelans none of them know what the sanctions on their country entail. I dont believe Maduro is perfect either but it sure is a one sided argument on their end. One of them is a full blown pro-usa boomer style chud. They are stupid shitheads when the socialist take over and they continue to be after the fact. Theres no magical socialism button that makes people less stupid.
Just because you lived in a Communist revolutionary government, doesn't mean you ever got to experience the benefit of communal equality.
Remember, the vast majority of people in the countries that had revolutions were made up of the rural poor. When a revolution succeeds, it doesn't happen everywhere at once.
Reactionary forces and a host of their allies will carve toe holds and propagandize to the population under their control . It takes damn near a generation just for a revolutionary government to stabilize and that's if they aren't still fighting off fascist.
This is inherent to any revolution, not just socialism or communism. However, the problem is more pronounced with communism as the infrastructure requirements for command economics. This is typically even further exacerbated by the previous government, who usually try and punish the general public by destroying key infrastructure on the retreat, usually attempting to lay the blame on revolutionaries.
It's perfectly understandable why a person who fled any kind of revolution would hate the revolution. In their memory of the status quo things were bad, but they still had a home, a family, a community. We are beings made of memories of our past experiences, thus it is easier to to glorify what we know moreso than what we could know.
Revolution is hard. If it happens in a western nation people on both sides of the divide will loose homes, families, and communities. And if history has anything to tell us, there is a slim to zero percent chance that any of us would would ever live to see the transition of revolutionary government to post scarcity communism.
The fact that this is even question proves how disassociated the modern vanguard is from the proletariat in under developed countries. It basically amounts to victim blaming. "Why didn't you stay and fight for revolution, didn't you understand theory"? Well embodied theory is kinda hard to learn when you're starving, or constantly being shot at by people you don't know, for reasons you don't know.
yeah you don't do a revolution and suddenly all the problems go away. That's step one
What’s to be done about this? You make very good points. My gut reaction was that it’s an education problem, but as you pointed out the educational infrastructure probably isn’t even built yet if the revolution is recent.
Tbh, I don't really know. I don't even know if armed revolution is even a possibility anymore. When I was a younger man I had hoped that the Internet would be a kin to the printing press 2.0. Something that would galvanize the world over and give a voice to the global poor.
A couple decades later I am beginning to realize that tools seemingly made with the intention of enlightenment and engagement can be reforged by capitalist to blind and mute us. Unfortunately it appears that tools built or reforged for capitalism cannot be co-opted by revolutionaries. I'm sure Murray Bookchin would prob have something witty to say about nature of systemic hierarchy about that one.
I don't really know what the future of communism or socialism will be. I just don't think it's going to arise from the old theory people are completely obsessed about. We live in a completely different world than mao or Lenin, and I think it's kind of silly for people to attempt to embody strategy and doctrine from a hundred years ago.
We live in a world with new tools, but not a new system. Capitalism is still the exact same as it was in their day. Material conditions don't lie, no matter how much people's preferred propaganda source says that everything is great under capitalism, their own personal oppression under the system will say otherwise. Anyone who says that Lenin or Mao are "outdated" because they are "old" hasn't actually read and understood them. The internet is largely used by capitalists the same way radio, television and newspapers were beforehand, they haven't "reforged" anything, they've just used it in the same way they use every other tool. The real re-forging will happen in post revolutionary states, who can use the internet the way it was originally intended, instead of as a platform for control and profit.
I mean that's not true at all. The intrinsic motivation is still the same, but it's structural hierarchy and the way it interacts and controls it's production and labour has evolved.
We havent really seen a Communist revolution since the advent of globalization. You can't just capture a territory and start utilizing it's infrastructure and resources for revolutionary purposes. The logistics of globalized capitalism just doesn't fit within the economic realities of Lenin's and Mao's time.
Say you capture a grain mill for food production, after all an army marches on it's stomach. Okay great, we can process grain! Oh wait, this mill imports it's grain from half way around the planet..... I guess we have to stall the revolution until we build infrastructure and grow a crop to harvest.
The capitalist learned from Mao, they know that they can't allow labour the possibility of controlling the means of production. So they've scattered the the production lines across the globe.
They figured that fix out a while ago.... It was slavery. The vast majority of people don't really care if their lives are shit so long as their is someone who's life is even shittier, and they have control over them. After most western nations outlawed slavery it took that coping mechanism away, and within a couple generations we had saw the advent of socialism. This of course was prior to the globalization of capitalism. We now have the whole southern hemisphere to exploit and control.
I'm not saying that there isn't useful information in mao or Lenin, the way they conducted their revolutions worked for for their society and their time. I just think being dogmatic about it or believing it can be applied to any time and location in history is silly. That ignores the fact that Mao himself evolved his theory from Lenin, specifically curtailing it to his own society and foes.
I think that's ignoring a lot of nuance and historical context. The invention of the printing press in the west marks the kicking off point of hundreds of years of revolutionary thought in Europe. It ushered in the decline of empires, theocratic states, and cultural acceptance of chattel slavery. It wasn't really until the advent of fascism that capitalist countries really learned how to develop counterrevolutionary tactics over these tools of revolution.
I think we might be talking past each other a bit. I'm not arguing for dogmatic and blind worship of these figures, just understanding of the conditions they faced and how that can potentially apply today. Both Mao and Lenin argued heavily for the idea that each individual revolutionary movement would have its own unique material conditions and issues to face. There is no "one size fits all" revolution.
Though you sound very much like an "end of history" liberal when you insist that things have "changed" and imply that capitalism has now "won" and will never end because conditions are different to how they were 70 years ago. The contradictions are still the same, even if it means that people outside of the west (where places are still capable of self-sufficiency) are the only ones capable of revolution. The imperial core has never been and never will be the main center of revolution. That hasn't changed since Lenin or Mao's day either.
I specified that in my post though, I didn't say that socialism is dead. I'm just not sure if armed revolution is really a possibility in our post globalized climate, and that people spent too much time obsessing about strategy that isn't applicable to the modern world.
Lol, I think you're making a lot of assumptions. I never claimed capitalism has won anything, nor did I say it will never end. That's materially impossible, we don't live on an infinite land of endless resources . All I said is that capitalism has evolved to harden it's defenses against strategies and tactics that have worked in the past. If you can't see how the dependence on a globalized logistic system to meet most basic needs of a population will have an effect on a localized revolution...... I don't really know what to tell you.
Unless we want to see a genocide via famine of the southern hemisphere, a revolution needs to maintain at least the logistical infrastructure we are currently using. We can see bits and pieces of this with the war in Ukraine, just a couple missed grain shipments would probably cause more deaths via starvation/destabilization in countries in the global south than the entire war.
This simply isn't true. The contradictions are still there, but no one is able to be self sufficient now a days, the population has exceeded the limit of most country's ability to feed itself without massive amounts of imports. Even if you discounted current political realities and did away with modern nation states, there isn't enough nitrogen in the soil to produce enough food for the global population. Which means we would still be dependent on oil and gass infrastructure to produce and distribute fertilizers.
You are making claims about a theoretical future revolution, but you don't even know the very basics of the current material conditions.
I'm not sure if this is a semantic dispute of what defines an imperial core, or if you just don't read history books..... But the Russian empire was literally the last pure monarchical empire in Europe when the revolution started. It was nearly as it's peak in the late 19th century and was one of the most successful expansionist empires in Europe.
You keep making broad sweeping claims, but you're not providing any current or historical context to support them. You aren't really even providing your own reasoning, you just seem to be applying dogmatic platitudes and expecting me to take them at face value.
I agree
People talk out of their ass all the time about everything. Living under a certain government does not make one an expert on that government any more than watching an MLB game makes one an expert on baseball. Tons of people who don't know shit about either will loudly share their opinions and throw a fit if you disagree.
Thr question isn't "have they seen it firsthand;" it's "do they understand the events around them and the associated context"?
plenty of people now live under capitalism and could not explain capitalism if they tried
People in the US get mad at their government when gas prices go up when it’s the result of some OPEC or Saudi decision lol. People have no clue what the causes are of the things that they experience most of the time.
It’s the same in socialist/communist countries: then those dumbasses get convinced to go to the US by all of its propaganda and they continue to believe that propaganda when they live there.
my belief is that there are subsections of society which are more prone to radicalism against the establishment and subsections which are pro establishment and these subsections don't really care what the establishment is. People with comfortable settled lives will like the establisment no matter what it is the same type of person in England that loves the king would probably have loved Stalin if they had been Russian at a certain point in time and inversely some people who are anti-capitalist because they don't like the establishment and it's all too much red tape and bureacratic bullshit would probably be anti-communist in a communist society. Of course people can move between these subsections of society and a successful revolution for example will see people go from one to the other with no change in beliefs. But you've only really made it when civil servants are part of your base
East Germany essentially concluded that no matter what they do to try and provide everyone with housing education etc roughly 10% of the population just want to drink smoke fight screw around and rebel against the man.
the vast majority of defectors to the west came from this 10% and of these defectors who risked their life going to west Germany a full third came back because the people who were sitting in front of the tv in east germany thinking that in the west they would have a sports car, penthouse and be married to a model found in the west that their lack of highly in demand skills in the east translated to the west and capitalism doesn't look after people with no money or marketable skills as well as they had hoped
True stuff
The only time that I have ever been stopped on the streets to be told that comunism sucks was by a Venezuelan
Somebody who probably had no clue that US sanctions were making life in venezuela hard and not socialist policies.
I've been trying to read up on the history of Venezuela (and modern-current day), but don't know where to find a book that wasn't written by someone with let's say... vested economic interests.
I know it's a punt, but would you happen to have any recommendations?