This is now the second highest voted post on r/Marxism
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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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hahaha holy shit.
Holy shit, I thought you were making a joke, but they really did.
The Marxism subreddit is run by toxic and shockingly ignorant ultras.
That tracks for Reddit's Marxist communities. Generally terrible.
I recall getting banned from one of those subs because I made some comment about not giving a shit whether I’m called a communist or a socialist as long as the meaning is understood
Deeply unserious and entirely western mods.
The post still smacks of typical Reddity individualism, idealism, and Great Man Theory. I’m not confident this person actually learned anything at all; if they came to the right conclusion, it was for the wrong reasons.
I just get tired of Redditors soapboxing like anyone should give a fuck what this guy in particular has fact-and-logicked to believe.
I don’t see much value in declaring victory when it rests entirely in their own shitty ideological terms. If you want to see more of how this guy talks, go look at r/CapitalismVSocialism, for example.
Yet, I’m willing to grant that this could be the beginning of a beautiful leftist blossoming for this Romanian.
Edit: it’s also been a long day but I’ll stand by my crankiness
I agree. It took Elon Musk Sieg Heiling for them to be all 'oh my goodness fascism is what capitalism becomes'
But they have no material basis for any of their conclusion, that's literally it; they explicitly state that the richest man being a Nazi means all capitalism tends towards fascism which is an incredible display of screwing up the entire calculation but getting the right answer in spite of that.
Not that many of us came to the left starting with material analysis. It's often real-life conditions or even just one symbolic event that drive people to start looking deeper.
This happened in the last trump election too. A lot of radlibs cosplayed as katniss everdeen, went ACAB and Black Lives Matters and then begged people to vote for biden and were putting their fingers into their ears while Palestinian genocide ramps up. Liberal thought constructs are rampant, even amongst the more higher consciousness westerners - it is a process that needs to be actively combated but a lot do not even want to read basic-level theory and simply dust off their hands and think themselves as fully formed revolutionaries because they expressed "capitalism bad". We must dissent.
You have to start somewhere (is my cope). Also I feel like my intellectual development started to bloom once I got off Reddit.
The more time passes, the more leftists are vindicated.
To paraphrase: being a leftist is being right too soon.
A communist is an exile from the future.
Captain, if these readings are correct... the temporal distortion has stranded us in the late capitalist era
sigh
For real. The reason I have an affinity to socialism is because it can provide the framework to understand society and where it's going more coherently and accurately than anything else.
Dialectical materialism is not an ideology but a science that improves over experience
100%, and as it daily proves more and more useful and tests itself, I become more and more solidified in my beliefs.
Contrast to the liberals going completely insane because nothing happening in reality fits their ideological worldview.
They are desperately lashing out at everything right now.
I take great joy in their suffering.
I take greater joy in seeing the radicalized turn to Leftists for guidance, which does appear to be happening. Hopefully our ranks swell.
I am an Orthodox Christian - I certainly have a problem with the way Yugoslavia (and especially Soviet Union) treated religious believers. I certainly have a problem with the gulags and the Goli Otok. I certainly believe Stalin and Tito were dictators. I certainly condemn the unbelievably large oppression of every single political opponent, of everything that was mildly different from what the Communist Party (in this and that country) would want…
(That is…if all those things were as bad as the West would have everyone believe or it was all so much propaganda through so many years that people are unable to separate it from reality. My own mother and father (an Orthodox priest) obviously have an incredibly low opinion of communism, and blame it for the wars in Yugoslavia, instead of nationalism (though this is related to what I will speak of later). So much that, when I said my brother did something bad and illegal to someone else for nationalistic reasons and I insisted he should face consequences, my mother responded with: “He’s your brother, you’re supposed to defend him! That’s the commie ‘justice and equality’, is it? Ah, I knew it.” Her words are also much stronger in Serbian, if you take the slur “komunjare” as well.)
So, I have a lot of problems. With Yugoslavia, with USSR, with China. You tell me if it is all a result of 80-year long propaganda but, if it is, this is something I basically cannot find true answers to - American sources would say the worst things, Soviet sources would say the best things, so what’s the reality? There is Romania, where people got so sick of communism they killed Nicolae - the only legal and violent overthrow of a communist government in history, and the only one that is dubbed a “revolution”.
So, I do not know. I truly do not.
But there has been one thing you have been warning us about. One thing you have been telling the whole Western world the whole time, which is why you called yourselves anti-fascists among all other things - the capitalistic world of the West is predisposed towards fascism…and, as it seems, even Nazism. After all, the richest man in the world is probably the best symbol of capitalism. And he made the Nazi salute in front of the whole planet.
That’s what you’ve been warning us the whole time. That capitalism is predisposed to nationalism, poverty and insecurity, that eventually leads into suffering and blaming of that suffering onto a small group of people (in this context, the immigrants, the LGBTQ+ and Muslims).
You were right. If Stalin and Tito appeared in front of me, I would have a thousand reasons to spit at them, but I would hold that back in, because of what is happening in USA, which is leagues worse than what we were thinking it would be: “You were right about fascism.”
I myself am…terrified and do not know what will happen. I am writing this and wondering if this could have been avoided if USSR was the one that “won” the Cold War instead of USA. Maybe it wouldn’t. But instead of that I will have to open four eyes, four ears, activate all my nervous systems in completion, pay extreme attention to everything that is happening, prepare and, beneath all that, continue to be afraid..
Once again, I admit: about this at least, you were right.
Here is the text of the post. It's not an American admitting they were wrong. It's someone who lives in Croatia.
Like I know people live inside of their own experiences and people will learn stuff through what they're exposed to. But it took Elon Musk making a Nazi salute for this person to realize part of what we've been saying?
Nevermind the American decimation of Korea, of Vietnam. Nevermind all the death squads sent into central and south America to install friendly dictators. What does this person make of the western backed genocide against Palestinians? Or the genocide against the Yemeni?
There's so much you'd have to ignore or apologize for if you're not convinced western capitalism is a death machine.
"...my brother did something bad and illegal to someone else for nationalistic reasons and I insisted he should face consequences, my mother responded with: “He’s your brother, you’re supposed to defend him! That’s the commie ‘justice and equality’, is it? Ah, I knew it.” Her words are also much stronger in Serbian, if you take the slur “komunjare” as well.)
OP was raised by nationalists (i read it that way anyhow). I dunno how old OP is or the politics of their region but I give em' credit for coming this far. If they're admitting 'socialists were right' and outing their parent's morals as "wrong" who knows what else they'll come to learn?
For real. They are one of Today’s Lucky 10,000. And it seems like they are figuring it out despite a complete immersion in a fascist family and culture. Croatia switched to an openly fascist government after the Yugoslavian tragedy. Good for them I say.
It’s weird that they would be in a community called Marxism but not already know this?
Weird, I couldn't get undelete to pull the deleted message.
Since the website loads data from the reddit API, I had to disable "Enhanced Tracking Protection" in my browser to make it load.
I should have checked that.
Hey, don’t worry about it reddit. We hate it when we’re right too!
I haven't assessed the quality of the comments yet
Alot of poorly read "marxists" in the comments, more interested in absolving the so-called crimes of socialism than helping the op attain a more grounded understanding of reality
Yeah saw a lot of "look, a lot of Marxists also think Stalin was an evil dictator" 
Was he not? Described to be a generally paranoid man and also all the purges that occured
Enlighten me
Being wary about capitalist (including Nazi) spies as the leader of the world's first socialist country, one that had been under attack since it was born, is prudent, not "paranoid."
Some of the purges (to be clear, purges means "party members being kicked out of the party" and not "mass executions") might have been in excess, but as I said above, they really worry under constant attack both overt and covert and their concern that capitalist sympathizers might have infiltrated the party was obviously warranted given that a capitalist sympathizer infiltrating the party ultimately became a pro-Western dictator and illegally overthrew the Soviet Union.
I'm not saying he was perfect, he was a human and had as many flaws as anyone, but he was a devoted communist, led the Soviet Union competently and these people are trying to throw him under the bus (and to avoid beating around the bush, they're trying to throw the whole Soviet project, as well as all other Communist projects under the bus) to gain clout with liberals who will never respect them.
I do believe that he was a communist thoroughly but I am not sure about your claim that his purges weren't a cause for bloodshed, it would be great if there was a source I could read
His leadership was not perfect and I do view him in a negative light (you may guess why) but it did propel the socialist world forward and his reforms helped many people and it was the first stepping stone for what came after
I do believe that he was a communist thoroughly
I'm not sure how much I'm wasting my time here, especially since you commented on a nearly week old comment to start this conversation, and you're from an instance I don't recognize as ideologically socialist, but we agree that this is a mark in his favor, right?
it would be great if there was a source I could read
I'm not particularly well-read to be honest, but Alaskaball put together a thread explaining what the purges were actually about (mostly expelling people who'd joined the party for personal advancement rather than ideological commitment to socialism, along with other assorted scum. Some people did get kicked out for holding beliefs at odds with party leadership, but it was mostly careerist and people with bad reputations amongst the [non-party] people they interacted with daily, like a University president who got purged for being deeply disliked by his school's students).
https://hexbear.net/post/213460?scrollToComments=false
you may guess why
Probably the redscare propaganda out society is inundated with daily, it even affects communists in the West.
Not a waste of time if you helped me — which you did — so thank you.
Thanks, a lot of people ask questions like that in bad faith so people (me included) are a little quick to get defensive sometimes. Glad you felt the interaction was beneficial.
They think they will gain mainstream approval from accepting "unavoidable evils" aka lies, revisionism, and slander. They have already surrendered the language of history to the empire.
Reddit is awful for Marxists.
Reddit is awful
Fair, lol.
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