Political Maturity Is Realizing The Commies Were Correct
Political maturity is finally admitting to yourself that the angriest, most disconcerting communist you’ve ever met was pretty much right about everything.
If you learn enough, stay humble enough, and pay close enough attention, eventually that’s what happens. You realize that, generally speaking, the really high-octane commies have the most lucid understanding of the world out of any group out there, and the only reason this wasn’t always obvious to you was because you live under a capitalist power structure which aggressively indoctrinates its populace from birth into believing that communism is No No Bad Bad.
They have the most lucid and correct understanding of capitalism. They have the most lucid and correct understanding of imperialist extraction. They have the most lucid and correct understanding of western warmongering, global power dynamics, white supremacy, institutional racism and misogyny. That’s why they keep being proven right, about everything from US military actions to the fascism of the far right to the abusive nature of the so-called “moderate” liberal to the moral depravity of billionaires and the capitalist class.
It’s still an open question how best to give rise to their vision for the world, because it would be a world that has never existed before, and because all their efforts to build that world have consistently been aggressively assaulted and sabotaged by the capitalist empire. But no group’s criticisms of the current status quo world order are more incisive and accurate than theirs.
If you’ve spent your life moving in sufficiently diverse and interesting circles, you’ve encountered outspoken Marxists in the past. What they said may have made you uncomfortable at the time, either because you were still too indoctrinated into the worldview of the capitalist empire or because you were still too interested in youthful frivolity to grapple with the serious subjects they were discussing. And eventually you realize that the discomfort you were experiencing is called cognitive dissonance, which is what being wrong feels like.
Maybe you got annoyed because they took their politics way too seriously and made it their whole thing, constantly pointing out the injustices and abuses in whatever subject came up when you were just trying to relax and enjoy life. And eventually you realize that the only reason you were able to just drift along without thinking about politics too much was because your worldview was sufficiently aligned with the political status quo to keep you from noticing all the exploitation, oppression, injustice and propaganda which pervades every aspect of our society. You didn’t notice it because it didn’t clash with your understanding of the world at the time.
If you keep your mind open, keep learning about the world, stay humble enough to see your errors and course-correct accordingly, you eventually see through all those distortions and understand that you had the commies all wrong.
There are still individual communists who get things wrong of course, and like most people in this psychologically disordered world a lot of them are emotional train wrecks who still need to do a lot of inner healing. But there’s no group which perceives the abusive dynamics of this civilization with a greater degree of intellectual clarity as a whole.
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The older I get (85 in a month), the more I think Marx was right. And that means the Communists in China and Russia were wrong. I will stick with Orwell, whose critique of totalitarianism (1984/Animal Farm) exposes the lies of the monster (as Khruschev called Stalin) who ruled the Soviet Union for decades in total defiance of Marx. And as for Mao, he was a another psychopath who, fortunately, has been succeeded by wise rulers who have brought China out of the cesspool created by Mao and rule with patience and moderation.
I am closer to being a communist (in the Marxian sense) than ever in my life, but those who ran things in China and the Soviet Union did so in total disregard for Marx's view that communism could only arise in a mature capitalist society, never in a poor, semi-feudal backwater like Russia or China.
I think the Soviet criticism of the West was basically correct and the Western criticism by Orwell and others was correct about the terrible flaws of the Soviet Union. Today's communist leaders are moderate and pragmatic, playing the long game. They understand that before there can be communism, there must be industrialization, concentrations of wealth, and the contradictions of capitalism must play out. Neither Stalin nor Mao understood this and their ignorance led to vicious criminality.
If we say the communists were right, it is imperative to say which ones: those most right were eliminated as traitors. Trotsky got an ax in the skull; and in China, hundreds of thousands of CCP officials were persecuted; many died through execution, suicide under duress, or prison abuse.
See The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 — Frank Dikötter
Focus: Ground-level purge violence
Strengths:
Based on newly opened Chinese archives.
Shows how mass denunciations and killings unfolded locally.
Details torture, struggle sessions, executions.
Part of Dikötter’s trilogy on Maoist campaigns."
I suggest avoiding blanket generalizations and defining terms. I suggest not taking sides. In doing so we betray the truth, for both sides lie alongside some accurate criticism. There is only one thing worth fighting for, and that is peace (Camus), and there is only one party worth joining, and that is the party of truth. And all the while, let us be humble and admit that we make mistakes and then learn from them. That is what the best in the West (democratic socialists et al) and in the communist universe have done.
Been a commie most of my life. It’s a tough journey at times but the tools of analysis that bring broad theory and practical everyday knowledge to life are very useful. Like any science doubt is a valuable friend. ✊🏼