Political Memes

When people say Communism had never been tried it's because communism is the end goal. It's the place we want to get to. A stateless, moneyless, classless society where everyone is truly equal. That's the ideal.

And Socialism is how we get there. Socialism is a scientific method of governance. It's not the insanity of "free-markets" nor is it the dictate of an autocrat. You need hospitals. You put the force of govt behind building hospitals and staffing them. You have a giant landmass so you need mass transit. You don't twiddle your thumbs waiting for the market winds to blow just right. You invest in building it. Because you need it. Because it's good for your people.

What? No, it's specifically Anarchists who want to speed run straight to communism. Marxists want to seize the state and guide it through a transitional stage (often called Socialism), which will end in the withering away of the state, and thus lead to Communism.

This was the whole nature of the split in the First International between Marx and Proudhoun.

To your point about Orwell, bringing up 1984 doesn't make a ton of sense here, as that's a book that is much more about fascism. Case in point, Immanuel Goldstein, the avatar of everything that Oceania opposes, is a man with a Jewish name.

Animal Farm, meanwhile, comes from Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War, where he was largely embedded with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The POUM were more ideology diverse than history gives them credit for, but was largely composed of what we would today consider Trotskyists.

That experience, coupled with his experience as a journalist during WW2, unable to publish his trotskyist influenced criticisms of the USSR due to wartime state repression, ultimately lead him to write Animal Farm.

The Stalin analogue pig is named Napoleon in large part due to debates between MLs and Trotskyists about the nature of world historical revolutions, since their only point of comparison was France, which ended up with Napoleon in charge. Was Stalin a Napoleon of Socialism? Was that a necessary phase in these sorts of revolutionary processes? Things like that are what Animal Farm is gesturing towards.

All of that aside though. I think it's needlessly limiting to lop yourself off into an ideological box and say "Only my pet socialist experiment is the Real one!"

As Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, etc. Whatever our ideological convictions, we all have the same ultimate goal, and are apart of the same broad tradition.

I have stark disagreements with my Anarchist friends, but they're still my comrades, and I still respect many things about their commitment to direct action, and will defend their political projects, current and historic, to the hilt. Our struggle is ultimately the same, and we have much to learn from one another.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.

Nail on the head. There's a particularly active lemming from the tankie instances that always, and purposefully, devolves everything into arguing about everyone else using words incorrectly.

I think this meme is referenced to this quote Orwell wrote after fighting for and living the revolution in Spain.

Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist Party thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.

This meme describes anarchists. Are you sure you know what the terms mean?