To anti-communists, communism is simultaneously a good idea but impractical, a bad idea and can never work, can’t result in anything good, and must be perfect if it is put into practice at all else it’s a total failure.
Meanwhile, in capitalist countries, when the capitalists bring the weight of the monopoly on violence to bear on the working class, when the capitalists function as designed and treat people like scuz, capitalism is excused as a “flawed system, but the best we’ve got,” mistakes made are just “corruption” or “human nature”, and wanting better is called “unrealistic.”
I think it’s important to keep this in view, that the way in which anti-communist sentiment talks about communism and capitalism is rife with double standards. And importantly, they have no real answer for chronic issues under capitalism. For chronic issues in a particular socialist project, we can talk about contradictions, about dialectics, about the struggle toward better and the mixture of theory and practice to achieve that. For chronic issues under capitalism, the best they’ve got is “this is human nature and it will always suck and air conditioned suburbia hot pocket life is the peak of civilization, so stop complaining and ow I just burned my tongue, but that’s beside the point, this is the best it gets.”
But could they just use confusion of correlation with causation (like claiming that Communism cause bad climate and not that bad climate select for Communism), fake news, fake educational materials, typical Neo-Liberal redefinition of words, credibility from false flag organizations like tankiejerkers, flawed measurements of prosperity, and unreliable sources like victim of Communism who fled from Communist China but are now praising Communist China for economic prosperity.
To anti-communists, communism is simultaneously a good idea but impractical, a bad idea and can never work, can’t result in anything good, and must be perfect if it is put into practice at all else it’s a total failure.
Meanwhile, in capitalist countries, when the capitalists bring the weight of the monopoly on violence to bear on the working class, when the capitalists function as designed and treat people like scuz, capitalism is excused as a “flawed system, but the best we’ve got,” mistakes made are just “corruption” or “human nature”, and wanting better is called “unrealistic.”
I think it’s important to keep this in view, that the way in which anti-communist sentiment talks about communism and capitalism is rife with double standards. And importantly, they have no real answer for chronic issues under capitalism. For chronic issues in a particular socialist project, we can talk about contradictions, about dialectics, about the struggle toward better and the mixture of theory and practice to achieve that. For chronic issues under capitalism, the best they’ve got is “this is human nature and it will always suck and air conditioned suburbia hot pocket life is the peak of civilization, so stop complaining and ow I just burned my tongue, but that’s beside the point, this is the best it gets.”
But could they just use confusion of correlation with causation (like claiming that Communism cause bad climate and not that bad climate select for Communism), fake news, fake educational materials, typical Neo-Liberal redefinition of words, credibility from false flag organizations like tankiejerkers, flawed measurements of prosperity, and unreliable sources like victim of Communism who fled from Communist China but are now praising Communist China for economic prosperity.
Fair points, there’s a lot of layers of misinformation in their thinking.