I’ve recently been reading anti-dühring and a bunch of writing from Marx and Engel and I continue to run into this problem where I realize how insane it is for someone to call themself a socialist after listening to a couple lectures and articles and reading the communist manifesto and maybe wage labor and profit and some excerpts. It’s maddening in the sense of, imagine someone being a fan of space or a general thing of physics and only knowing the very basic premises but not the details in of themselves, and if you yourself were a physicist and knew the details and listened to an explanation of physics by someone who knows only the most basic generalizations of the topic. Theory and especially materialist theory and dialectics is basically a socio-economic science, you can’t grasp materialism in just a short video that simplifies things like so many science and physics type videos out there.
On top of that there’s an entire history of socialism from the utopians like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, Weitlung. That history is Socialist history, Communist history, how does one not try and understand their history in order to understand their own beliefs? Libertarian Socialist? What’s that even? It sounds like an Idealist philosophy if anything. All I know is that there are two camps of Socialism, the Idealists and the Materialists, the Idealists being: all the flavors of the anarchos such and such. The Materialists being: Marxist Leninists, MLMs. The idealist socialism and this seems to always be the case is they’re usually people who’ve not read much theory or has read some but not enough to get a good grasp of historical materialism or dialectics and attempt to ascribe their vague abstractions of what is their personal ideas of justice and not a materialist justice based on socio-economic conditions and the solutions to reconcile antagonisms in a society, specifically class antagonism.
What sucks of this knowing too much is that like any person who has a good grasp of a subject one can’t help but want to constantly try and correct someone who is totally wrong. An example of mine is where I met an “anarcho-communist” recently and asked out of curiosity what they read and they told me they didn’t much read because they don’t like reading and instead mostly watch YouTube videos, I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t gonna get into an argument with someone who sees themselves as a comrade but I can tell you it was frustrating. It’s like someone saying “I know everything there is to know about feudal society, they had like knights and stuff, I know cuz I took one course on it”.
I’m surprised that the radlibs you know haven’t at least internalized some anti-communist narratives about socialism. They don’t resist being taught about socialism by regurgitating the usual talking points?
Most of the radlibs I’ve known have been poor or at least from poor families and mostly PoCs, their rad liberalism was very simple and justice minded. I mean I wouldn’t imagine they’d call themselves pro capitalist or anti capitalist, just aware of the injustice of wealth and the system so the potential was always there.
They don’t hit you with 100 million, didn’t work, everyone starved, no freedom?
No because their knowledge of Communism is just the Soviet Union that they learned about in High School, I think the only people who’ve read the black book have been anti-comms or pro capitalists with a clear intent to prevent organization. Most poor liberals are social democrats something like what MLK was early on without actually knowing it, most of the anti communism usually comes from Anarchist circles or politically active libertarians.
Your high schools don’t teach about the supposed evils of communism?
Never to the extent you see in videos. I never knew anything about holodomor or Great Leap Forward but I do remember in public school them teaching about the 5 year plan, not too deep just the usual propaganda such as the Soviets “intentionally” starved their own citizens etc, and that USSR was “authoritarian” and harsh but public school would brush over that history so quickly that it never took.
The most I do remember though is American exceptionalism propaganda which is horrible, it literally makes the country look perfect through all its history and white washes the fuck out of “manifest destiny”. If anything the anti communism stuff isn’t the largest of the propaganda but making America look like the greatest democracy history has ever known is something that is definitely perpetuated in history classes.
How did they not get a general anti-communist attitude just from their surroundings? How often does the media, church, workplace or whatever mention socialism or communism?