I mean since socialism won for a few decades, but then capitalism won back again.
I think something along the lines of; Capitalism is unable to ever "win". No matter how many communists you kill, how many of them you force to live under capitalism, or how many of them you force to "disavow" communism, you can't kill the idea. The struggle never ends, dialectics tells us this very clearly: Capitalism is unable to solve it's inherent contradictions, even if all knowledge of communism were to disappear, someone would inevitably bring it up again.
Or he would aggressively point at this picture with the quote over and over again.
This is true, and its also why the pessimists and doomers are wrong
My dear comrade, while I'm still pushing for a change and it's absolutely not too late.
(Super intelligent) AI + armed forces Automation will really be the end of the struggle. We have a window.
Definitely disagree. There won't be some final end of technological development and even if there were, the mass displacement of labor would take time and during that time class consciousness would skyrocket as it is doing now.
There are only 2 ways the worker-capitalist contradiction can ever be solved:
- communism
- exterminism (from Peter Frase's Four Futures), where the capitalists finally fulfill their dream of automating everything and can genocide all the unneeded workers.
It's quite important we bring about revolution before option 2 becomes viable.
It scarcely needs proof that there is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of "super-revolutionary" acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats.
The historical era is needed not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and remould the petty-bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organisation of socialist production.
-- Stalin
Setbacks and temporary failures are not indicative of a permanent failure. The capitalists are obviously going to swing back. But ultimately the people punch harder
I think it's fair to say most people expected capitalism to collapse sooner, but the overall trajectory seems to be precisely as Lenin predicted. Global capitalism is currently in a historic crisis, meanwhile China is going from strength to strength. USSR was the very first attempt at socialism, and unfortunately it was eventually overthrown, but we have to always keep the long view when thinking about these things.
China still lasts...
What we have now is potential revolutionary energy...
Capitalism has been around for a much shorter time than feudalism, and feudalism took hundreds of years to be fully overtaken. Imagine being a 14th century peasant saying "man, it looked like feudalism was declining for a bit there, but I've spent my entire life (30 years) waiting for it to collapse and it's still here, so I guess it must be the natural order after all."
