For former socialists, there’s one argument I see them use for why they are not socialist anymore.

That argument is that they felt guilty about wanting to push their ideology onto others and so they started believing in parliamentary politics again where every opinion is valuable. My dad who used to be an anarchist as a teenager used this reasoning, as well as one of my teachers.

But this argument doesn’t make sense to me, because it makes politics into something which only revolves around opinions, while we communists and the capitalist class know it’s about power.

I feel like these people never learned much about their ideology when they were socialists. I think I will never stop being a communist, I know too much.

Have you seen this reasoning yourself?

  • Cheburashka@lemmygrad.ml
    20·
    11 days ago

    That’s another reason I am very skeptical of “Western Leftists”, by which I mean dem-socs and anarchists. They are often the “Ben Shapiros” of the Left, just arguing for entertainment, and this makes them quick to abandon as they get older and less interested in drama. I think this camp is excessively idealistic as well, I’ve heard claims like:

    “Socialism is just workers voting in the work place”

    or that “you can vote away the capitalism”

    or that “USSR wasn’t real socialism,”

    or “Successful socialism is Scandinavia and Universal Healthcare.”

    Whenever I hear these claims I instinctively get suspicious of the person. I feel like these are the people that are eventually saying “you’ll be left in your younger years and move right as you age,” because they didn’t read any theory and just hopped on a bandwagon to be contrarian, it could have easily been ben shapiro politics too.