The far off hypothetical society stuff is so unconvincing that I regularly see folks on our side get blindsided when liberals start poking holes in it. Granted, liberals critique it from the framework of "you can't possibly fix every single problem so we shouldn't even try" but our side falls into the trap and tries to go after "actually we can fix every problem." It's such a misstep we should avoid and it should be obvious we can't promise utopia, we can offer concrete direct political goals right now. Probably mixed in with optimistic hopeful rhetoric too.
Seriously, nothing more really needs to be said (at least for Marxists) than "it's far in the future and we don't know how we'll address all these problems yet. The important part is the transitional state, which can take care of people while working towards communism."
What I've fallen back on is the idea that even if some hypothetical communist future never comes, at the very least we can liquidate landlords and leash the bourgeoisie, because those are proven methods of increasing quality of life. The mere act of chasing a communist future grants the population a better present. So why not chase after it?
The far off hypothetical society stuff is so unconvincing that I regularly see folks on our side get blindsided when liberals start poking holes in it. Granted, liberals critique it from the framework of "you can't possibly fix every single problem so we shouldn't even try" but our side falls into the trap and tries to go after "actually we can fix every problem." It's such a misstep we should avoid and it should be obvious we can't promise utopia, we can offer concrete direct political goals right now. Probably mixed in with optimistic hopeful rhetoric too.
Seriously, nothing more really needs to be said (at least for Marxists) than "it's far in the future and we don't know how we'll address all these problems yet. The important part is the transitional state, which can take care of people while working towards communism."
What I've fallen back on is the idea that even if some hypothetical communist future never comes, at the very least we can liquidate landlords and leash the bourgeoisie, because those are proven methods of increasing quality of life. The mere act of chasing a communist future grants the population a better present. So why not chase after it?
Exactly. Even if communism never is achieved, practically speaking worldwide socialism would be so many orders of magnitude better than we have now.
Anarchists call this "prefiguration" and it's great and people should do more of it.