capital still has not coopted stalin, leading him to be an important banner, as the ultimate evil in the mind of the liberal
The Russian Federation has sort of co-opted Stalin, in that he's held up as a kind of national hero in large parts of the country without any reference to or emphasis on communism.
Supposedly they tried to do the same to Lenin, but it turned out to be literally impossible to frame Lenin's words as anything but anti-capitalist
Queue the picture of the chest tattoo with Stalin on one pec and Nikolai II on the other.
Forms of anticapitalism that aren't designed to finish the job are like an interrupted course of antibiotics. Just breeds superbugs.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Seriously though what does communism need to do to have this ability? This algorithm that self organizes to turn attacks against it into strength?
Is it just hegemony or is it something a command economy needs to be advanced enough to actively replicate?
Capitalism only loves pretending to be us because of our cool aesthetic
I'd posit it's a sort of weaponized resignation: capitalist propaganda works on multiple fronts, from the engines that insist it's the natural order of things to the ones that exalt its principles as a pure and unblemished good to the ones that recapture doubters who recognize that it's awful, actually. It's that last part, the machine that tries to insist that capitalist systems may be flawed but that they work, that exploitation of the marginalized is in fact a charity being given to them by the benevolent ruling class, that however bad things may look this is actually the best it can possibly be. Recuperating dissent is a part of that, because they can still commodify and market it without endangering themselves, especially when the dissent is limited to just calling for the most tepid of concessions.
I don't think that can be turned around: the capitalists want to extract wealth above all else because that's their source of power, but what power can be extracted by decommodifying capitalist apologetics or bad faith critiques of socialist projects?
