To continue my Devil’s advocacy, your further comments lead me to question whether you are not being arrogant in thinking that you have THE exact perfect analysis (aka party line) that will allow you to know exactly when and how to act that will work perfectly to bring about successful communism. No matter how and when you act/don’t act, there will be critics who say “now is not the right time” or “that was not the right action/tactic/strategy to engage in.” Those critiques apply to organizing unions, strikes, protests, sabotage, assassination, or any other way people try to change things.
To continue your line of thinking about keeping things that are unpopular quiet (like the Bolsheviks robbing banks), every thing communists do is pretty unpopular in the countries benefiting the most from global capitalism, from unions to protests to radical education etc. All of those things are not what I would call universally popular.
And In fact communist groups have a terrible history of labeling every single thing that is not their plan as reactionary. And the Bolsheviks were able to claim that they were right about those they labeled reactionary because their strategy worked- for a while. Yet now that there system has fallen, they are susceptible to the same epithet.
None of us know what, if anything, will work (although we may know what won’t work) until it works. The bolsheviks did not know that what they did would work, and perhaps had they done some things differently, the USSR would not have weakened to the point of being able to be destroyed by the 1990s.
To continue my Devil’s advocacy, your further comments lead me to question whether you are not being arrogant in thinking that you have THE exact perfect analysis (aka party line) that will allow you to know exactly when and how to act that will work perfectly to bring about successful communism. No matter how and when you act/don’t act, there will be critics who say “now is not the right time” or “that was not the right action/tactic/strategy to engage in.” Those critiques apply to organizing unions, strikes, protests, sabotage, assassination, or any other way people try to change things.
To continue your line of thinking about keeping things that are unpopular quiet (like the Bolsheviks robbing banks), every thing communists do is pretty unpopular in the countries benefiting the most from global capitalism, from unions to protests to radical education etc. All of those things are not what I would call universally popular.
And In fact communist groups have a terrible history of labeling every single thing that is not their plan as reactionary. And the Bolsheviks were able to claim that they were right about those they labeled reactionary because their strategy worked- for a while. Yet now that there system has fallen, they are susceptible to the same epithet.
None of us know what, if anything, will work (although we may know what won’t work) until it works. The bolsheviks did not know that what they did would work, and perhaps had they done some things differently, the USSR would not have weakened to the point of being able to be destroyed by the 1990s.