That whole sequence is too real. You've just learned some basic theory and you're ready to meet comrades in real life. You scour local message boards and ask around until you're able to finally find where some leftists meet. You show up, you're nervous but pumped. You're ready for revolution and it's two college students who ask if you know who Adorno is.
Gone. Gone is the glory. Of hope, only the scribbling of impoverished students remain. In dirty hallways...
You are the big communism builder now. It's you or no one.
the thing that actually got me is that one of those college students than gives you the most real answer to the MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION and i really didn't expect the whole COMMUNISM IS ABOUT LOSING bit just finding the perfect conclusion in that answer
CW for misanthropy maybe
I think about that a lot, honestly. They say "learn from the winners." Well, I know who won the cold war, and the kind of nightmarish shit they did to people to do it, and I sometimes think, maybe the communists should have done more of that to them. Maybe at least it would have been mostly over by now. But that's also a really emotionally driven thought rather than something well-considered.
relevant
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported -- what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
That group was annihilated.
—Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
“Grind the bourgeoisie into hamburger NOW!”
“What about dinner?”
“Kronk, this is kind of important.”
“How bout dessert?”
“Well, I suppose there’s time for dessert.”
“And coffee?”
“All right a quick cup of coffee. THEN GRIND THE BOURGEOISIE INTO HAMBURGER!”
Literally the case for the actual Communards, whose restraint against the "legitimate" French government was repaid with the Bloody Week.
