In my opinion, people easily fall into idealist critiques of Marxists if they don’t read Marx.
All. The. Time. It’s why I mostly don’t even bother arguing with people who won’t even at least attempt to read Marx or any theory. LIke, don’t even throw dialectics in the mix. I just want these people to grasp the basics instead of running to cliches and fallacies.
I have been weening off of the debate-broing (even though I still do it ) but I think clearly pointing out the court jesters for Imperialism, the “left” anticommunists that don’t understand the very beginnings of Marxism yet claim to be critiquing Socialist movements “from the left” is invaluable for leading other people to theory and radicalization.
I have no belief that Flying Squid will become a Marxist after this, but maybe one or two libs were SWCC-pilled when they saw my dunk on a Lemmy.world post, and may reconsider their anti-PRC stance in the future. Just a small hope.
Watching Libs interact with MLs on forums and subs is what prompted me to get curious about the Left, in general.
Same here! I almost think reading just a bit of Marx does more harm than good, because idealism and liberalism fills in the gaps if you don’t thoroughly purge them with an understanding of Dialectical and Historical Materialism first, rather than the usual path of understanding his critique of Capitalism and advocacy for collective ownership. A liberal and idealist analysis results in the weird ultra-Maoist liberal takes from people like Flying Squid, they don’t even like Mao so what did they want to happen? Magic Marxism to elevate the productive forces? People to legitimately stay poor under a system without private property, but little productive forces to begin with?
People who think you must go through Capitalism to get to Communism are wrong, of course, but so is the idea that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat carefully managing and pruning a market economy is suddenly Capitalist because there’s Private Property.
If it wasn’t for online debate-broing on reddit I’d probably still be a DemSoc tbh.
