It’s fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China or Vietnam claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. These people able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
What’s weird to me is that China and Vietnam’s turn towards a market economy is usually framed as a betrayal, especially by other socialists. The way they portray it, it’s as if the CPC or CPV are secretly neoliberals behind closed doors. All the debate over reforms in either country was apparently just an insincere and cynical grift. You’d think listening to these people that China and Vietnam didn’t lift millions out of poverty through their economic policies.
It’s especially baffling since we can look to the USSR where the revolution and working classes were genuinely betrayed. The net consequence was a massive decline in living standards for working people. That is decidedly not what happened in China and Vietnam.
I get the impression is that what it ultimately comes down to is that admitting this requires also admitting that better things are indeed possible. The whole mantra in the west is that yeah shit sucks, but everything else is worse, so let’s not rock the boat too hard. Hence, most of the western left is invested in reformism. Admitting that China or Vietnam actually work the way it was intended means having to accept that ML approach was correct all along, and that western left has shat the bed.
I do suspect that part of the problem is better things are not currently possible in a western context. As such, the western left finds itself searching for that one weird trick which will spark off a revolutionary movement. This search inevitably leads them away from historical materialism and towards idealism.
I do think this may be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Since people feel that better things aren’t possible they’re not trying to work towards them. If we look at the way the right has been organizing, it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of people who are disillusioned with the western political mainstream. These people could be educated and recruited into a communist movement if there was active organization happening. The main problem that I see is that a lot of people on the left are rejecting effective methods for building a movement that have been proven in the past as being authoritarian.
They are really hooked over the weird idea of “hiding the power level”. For them, socialist governments consequently realising plan of building socialism are the hidden neoliberals, while succdems like Bernie, consequently participating in imperialism and neoliberalism are real socialists who only wait for finally being in power to suddenly push the communism button (and they also accuse us ML’s of being “blanquists”).
