Any anarchist (and tons of other people on the left) has good-faith criticisms of the Soviet Union and other socialist projects. You can disagree with those criticisms (I disagree with many of them myself) but that doesn’t make them imperialist, especially if they’re coming from someone who’s explicitly opposed to imperialism.
Disparaging socialist states, as a self-proclaimed socialist, by asserting that they aren't or weren't socialist or fighting for any egalitarian values whatsoever or that they were just dictatorships is reinforcing imperialist narratives. While these "criticisms" might be good faith in the sense that they're sincere, they're worthlessly simplistic and demonstrate no attempt to investigate these countries and their historical context whatsoever.
This persistent attitude among Western socialists that every socialist revolution in history was actually fake socialism, that it was just dictatorial "authoritarianism" or whatever, while insisting that Scandinavia is somehow socialist, is rooted in Western chauvinism.
To put it another way: do you have to unthinkingly support anything and everything Cuba or China does or else you’re an imperialist? Of course not; critical support is a thing.
That's a strawman. I never said you have to unthinkingly or uncritically support socialist countries. But it's clear from the piece that Robinson doesn't support them at all:
It’s that these regimes bear absolutely no relationship to the principle for which I am fighting. They weren’t egalitarian in any sense; they were dictatorships.
...
The primary lesson here is not about “egalitarianism” or “socialism” or even “communism” since Castro, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin did not actually attempt to implement any of those ideas. Instead, the lesson is about what happens when you have a political ideology that contains a built-in justification for any amount of horrific violence.
You absolutely, as a citizen living in the imperial core, have to support countries struggling against American imperialism to not be an imperialist. He doesn't.
I mean, this is just laughable, bad-faith nonsense. He cites leftist authors plenty and reviews their books. This is what bothers me about burning the guy at the stake because he doesn’t show adequate reverence for Marx – you have a guy who’s unarguably doing more than his part to advance the cause of socialism and we’re creating a part of the left willing to make shit up out of whole cloth to throw at him. That’s not a good trend and it should be strangled in its crib.
Oh come on, I obviously didn't mean that literally. No shit he reads things.
But he specifically does not read (or at least didn't understand even slightly) any of Marx, Engels, or Lenin, based on how he interpreted "dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean a literal dictatorship in the modern sense.
He's not "advancing the cause of socialism"; he's diluting it into meaninglessness and stripping it of its revolutionary character at a time when people are becoming radicalized. He's a textbook opportunist, and it's good that he's getting dunked on.
Disparaging socialist states, as a self-proclaimed socialist, by asserting that they aren't or weren't socialist or fighting for any egalitarian values whatsoever or that they were just dictatorships is reinforcing imperialist narratives. While these "criticisms" might be good faith in the sense that they're sincere, they're worthlessly simplistic and demonstrate no attempt to investigate these countries and their historical context whatsoever.
This persistent attitude among Western socialists that every socialist revolution in history was actually fake socialism, that it was just dictatorial "authoritarianism" or whatever, while insisting that Scandinavia is somehow socialist, is rooted in Western chauvinism.
That's a strawman. I never said you have to unthinkingly or uncritically support socialist countries. But it's clear from the piece that Robinson doesn't support them at all:
...
You absolutely, as a citizen living in the imperial core, have to support countries struggling against American imperialism to not be an imperialist. He doesn't.
Oh come on, I obviously didn't mean that literally. No shit he reads things.
But he specifically does not read (or at least didn't understand even slightly) any of Marx, Engels, or Lenin, based on how he interpreted "dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean a literal dictatorship in the modern sense.
He's not "advancing the cause of socialism"; he's diluting it into meaninglessness and stripping it of its revolutionary character at a time when people are becoming radicalized. He's a textbook opportunist, and it's good that he's getting dunked on.