523
Capitalism is the root of evil
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Great comment! You hit the nail on the head, proper conversation requires a factual starting point, and just conceding to conservatives and other anticommunists off the bat just so they are less hostile to you just hands them free rhetorical wins on that very basis.
I did not call you a conservative, if that's what you're implying. My point aligns with theirs, in that demonization of AES is usually a result of accepting bourgeois narratives uncritically. To be truly critical in an honest manner (which Marxists are, all the time, among ourselves), we need to dispell the thick layers of Red Scare fearmongering first.
Dispelling myths and finding the hard truth is where we can look at what went right and what went wrong, not just agreeing that Socialism is when everyone starves or other such nonsense. Why support an ideology that truly is as bad in practice as anticommunists say it is, after all?
You'll find me critical of AES all the time, but I won't cede ground for what I know to be false just for optics. I take a rigorous approach to rhetoric, I cede no ground that isn't rooted in fact, and I do my best to encourage accurate critique. When you see me defending AES and seemingly not critiquing them as much, it's usually in the context of someone repeating the same bog-standard state department anticommunist mythos that have existed for decades, and thus should be treated as such.
Go ahead and ask me for critiques of AES, and I can do so, but I won't lie about them either.
If the person is nervous about legitimate abuses in AES, then I do my best to make sure those abuses are accurately highlighted. Here's an example of me doing just that. I'm not going to pivot the conversation to a different area just to highlight unrelated flaws, though, that's off-topic and rhetorically bad. Surely you can see that, right?
Like, yes, Stalin outlawing gay marriage was bad, indisputably. Bolsheviks that were pro-gay marriage like Kollontai should have been listened to. I don't need to insert that or other critiques into every comment, though.