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  • white western leftists will literally be like "yes I'm a socialist... I just hate everything that socialism has done in the world and I'll gladly defend anti-communist efforts when they don't directly effect me"

    • 💯 % true!!

    • They're liberals who are enamoured by socialist aesthetics. It only goes as deep as the Che Guevara t-shirt

      • telling a white "socialist" about Che's ideals and tactics made them look at me in disgust, and later I saw that they posted on social media that they threw out all of their "commie merch".

        These people are posers and nothing else, they will back the whites in the revolution.

  • Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution (2020) by Jones Manoel

    There is a great tendency in the eastern left, according to Perry Anderson, to separate western and eastern Marxism. Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key characteristic, never exercised political power. It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself with philosophical and aesthetic issues. It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and the problem of the conquest of political power. More and more it has taken a historic distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Viet Nam, Cuba and so forth. This western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been authoritarian, totalitarian or violent. This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth – this is a very important point.

    Every movement that appears to stray a bit from these “pure” models that were created a priori is explained through the concept of betrayal, or is explained as “state capitalism.” Therefore, nothing is socialism and everything is state capitalism. Nothing is socialist transition and everything is state capitalism. The revolution is only a revolution during that glorious moment of taking political power. Starting from the moment of building a new social order, its over. Revolution is always a political process which has two moments: a moment of destruction of the old capitalist order and taking power, and a moment of building a new order. The contradictions, the problems, the failures, the mistakes, sometimes even the crimes, mainly happen during this moment of building the new order. So when the time comes to evaluate the building of a new social order -- which is where, apparently, the practice always appears to stray from the purity of theory -- the specific appears corrupted in the face of the universal. It is at this point that the idea of betrayal is evoked, that the idea of counter revolution is evoked, and that the idea of State Capitalism appears in order to preserve the purity of theory.

  • The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. Being pure is what provokes this narcissistic orgasm. This purity is what makes them feel superior.

    from Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture by Jones Manoel

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