I keep wanting to form some kind of housing cooperative for people seeking refuge from abusive situations, seeing as how there's currently fuck-all meaningful resources for adult survivors of childhood abuse. I know that despite this being completely nonviolent, legal, voluntary, and well-intentioned operation, that most people won't care or will actively support when some extremists decide to infiltrate and sabotage that effort. Manufactured consent and all. Why does nobody else do things like this? What has prevented the vast majority of other American leftists from simply crowdfunding their own communes, leaving the larger economy, and building their own means of production so that they aren't dependent on the rest of the world for permission to build systems of mutual aid?
Calling attention to people's errors in thinking and inviting them to change their mind is often considered by communists to be a pretty important part of combating liberalism and generally a good thing.
I don't know what to call it if you think that I shouldn't critique a strategy Engels critiqued in the 1800s. Maybe I should just wish you luck with your own strategy.
I agree it's a good thing to discuss what can be done to create a revolutionary environment and to think about the pro's and con's of different kinds of actions. I don't think it's productive to dismiss something outright because there are historic critiques of such an action, especially in environment those critiques were not made in.
I'll admit I don't read as much theory as I should so I don't have primary knowledge, but I can't imagine that communists in history would call alienated folks seeking to live together and pool their skills and labor to support themselves in a system that has cast them aside counter revolutionaries. Especially if the alternative is to maintain ideological purity by living on the streets and accomplishing just as little for the revolution while also punishing their bodies and not gaining any useful skills for after a government is toppled and society becomes very different
Much of Engels' work drew directly on Lewis Henry Morgan as a primary source.
Between that and how we have made informative advances in biology and psychology and sociology, I will drag Engels day in and day out, thank you very much.