It's definitely very confusing in the context of a dominant Western culture that has always intentionally misled everyone about what the word refers to as well! All these people saying things like, "well real communism has never been tried" are obliviously posting their Ls but generally go uncorrected, for example.
Communists are people who fight for a people's revolution such that the capitalist class is subjugated and the people are on top, eventually leading to a little-c communist way of being. That "eventually" is where communists disagree with one another on strategy and intermediate stages, but Marxist communists will, as Marx predicted, generally insist on an intermediate stage that looks almost exactly like the capitalist mode of production and which has not yet ended exploitation as a matter of continued practical existence. They will say it's a necessary step to get to another stage and to survive against imperialists, and I would say they are at least a lot more successful at continued existence than other attempts to build socialist projects. Also, both Mao and Lenin provide practical lessons in what negatives can occur when you hit the command economy button too hard and too quickly.
But there is the appearance contradiction due to the language when a communist must avidly promote the establishment and defense of state capitalism or adjacent modes of products. No doubt.
See, this is the problem with going to the US and getting a fancy degree in a bunch of shit some old dead white people wrote about politics 100-400 years ago. Regardless of whether the old dead white people were chill anarchist grandmas or sexist slave owners, you're not exactly learning shit about fuck when it comes to anything outside the western political zeitgeist in the late modern period or later.
Of course. The usefulness, imo, of anarchist grandmas from ages ago is seeing shared experience and what worked (and didn't) in their conditions. It's a great way to displace theoretical discussions that otherwise lack a scientific (in the social sciences sense) basis with real strategies that butted up against powerful forces and succeeded and failed for very specific reasons that we should be careful to avoid - when applicable. It also gives us shared language and examples to make communication between socialists easier.
But yeah, even though I'd like to say that, say, a la Luxemburg is a good idea, we have to remember that Germany was barely post-feudal at the time and fascism was developing at the same time as monarchs waned and capitalists were finishing their economic coup. Current conditions have similarities and differences that are both important. It's not an instruction manual.
Also Western lib discussion of all of this is so goddamn shallow and focuses on psychologically analyzing leaders and generally ignoring historical, economic, or cultural context outside of basic identity politics. Hell they still try to gloss over colonialism all the damn time. The backdrop to a mid-century American leftist is a euphemism like "Western expansion" without an analysis of how this racist appropriation drove the development of these ideas and movements. It's just there. Cowboys pew pew.
It's definitely very confusing in the context of a dominant Western culture that has always intentionally misled everyone about what the word refers to as well! All these people saying things like, "well real communism has never been tried" are obliviously posting their Ls but generally go uncorrected, for example.
Communists are people who fight for a people's revolution such that the capitalist class is subjugated and the people are on top, eventually leading to a little-c communist way of being. That "eventually" is where communists disagree with one another on strategy and intermediate stages, but Marxist communists will, as Marx predicted, generally insist on an intermediate stage that looks almost exactly like the capitalist mode of production and which has not yet ended exploitation as a matter of continued practical existence. They will say it's a necessary step to get to another stage and to survive against imperialists, and I would say they are at least a lot more successful at continued existence than other attempts to build socialist projects. Also, both Mao and Lenin provide practical lessons in what negatives can occur when you hit the command economy button too hard and too quickly.
But there is the appearance contradiction due to the language when a communist must avidly promote the establishment and defense of state capitalism or adjacent modes of products. No doubt.
See, this is the problem with going to the US and getting a fancy degree in a bunch of shit some old dead white people wrote about politics 100-400 years ago. Regardless of whether the old dead white people were chill anarchist grandmas or sexist slave owners, you're not exactly learning shit about fuck when it comes to anything outside the western political zeitgeist in the late modern period or later.
Of course. The usefulness, imo, of anarchist grandmas from ages ago is seeing shared experience and what worked (and didn't) in their conditions. It's a great way to displace theoretical discussions that otherwise lack a scientific (in the social sciences sense) basis with real strategies that butted up against powerful forces and succeeded and failed for very specific reasons that we should be careful to avoid - when applicable. It also gives us shared language and examples to make communication between socialists easier.
But yeah, even though I'd like to say that, say, a la Luxemburg is a good idea, we have to remember that Germany was barely post-feudal at the time and fascism was developing at the same time as monarchs waned and capitalists were finishing their economic coup. Current conditions have similarities and differences that are both important. It's not an instruction manual.
Also Western lib discussion of all of this is so goddamn shallow and focuses on psychologically analyzing leaders and generally ignoring historical, economic, or cultural context outside of basic identity politics. Hell they still try to gloss over colonialism all the damn time. The backdrop to a mid-century American leftist is a euphemism like "Western expansion" without an analysis of how this racist appropriation drove the development of these ideas and movements. It's just there. Cowboys pew pew.