this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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In defense of the people within popular tendencies (not the tendencies themselves) that I think you might call "not communist," there is also an issue of people being severely miseducated on what other people believe, such as people thinking that all so-called "Stalinists" uncritically support everything that Stalin said and believed and that these things included stabbing smol bean anarchists in the back in Spain and Makhnovchina for the sake of power. I believe this miseducation is the source of a lot of division and we have seen that intelligence agencies deliberately stoke such things.
It's especially challenging with Stalin since, as materialists, we want to be able acknowledge the good and the bad, but most of the "bad" that we hear about are outright lies, historical revisionism, or things that can't be blamed on a single individual. It puts us in the position of starting the conversation by defending him from falsehoods, since the conversation always starts with falsehoods. As communists we need to be able to discuss the history and theoretical development in order to properly educate and theorize in the present moment, and Stalin is an important part of that process who, when erased, always leads back to inherently anti-communist education and theory
I have a really bad sense of rhetoric most of the time, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think at least with some audiences one way of approaching this is by explaining errors and misdeeds on Stalin's part that they aren't even aware of (or even just that they don't take as particularly bad but we do) to establish "I'm not arguing that Stalin did nothing wrong, I'm arguing that many of your specific accusations are at best exaggerated and in some cases just fictional".