I wouldn’t be too worried about what the imagined liberals in the walls might think. There can’t be too many of them and bad faith actors will always be able to find something and take it out of context. And if you can’t speak freely as a communist on a communist niche forum where can you?
Stalin, unlike any of the morally pure western leftists, actually held power and had to defend it and he did so successfully. It’s not like aligning the USSR with “moderate” imperialist nations didn’t have it’s downsides but the alternative was to be overrun and slaughtered by the more radical fascists.
A pragmatic alliance made for lack of better alternatives doesn’t change the analysis of the nature of social democracy. They serve the same master as the fascists. Where the social democrats wants to preserve capitalism by bribing a select labour aristocracy into complementary the fascists use more direct violence but ultimately they will both tend to side with capital if it’s rule is threatened.
the imagined liberals in the walls
How are they imagined? They comment here regularly. Our threads show up in their feeds. Their threads show up on ours, and we comment on them. We talk to mods of reddit communities looking to move somewhere better. None of this is hypothetical.
I’ve made the the exact “Stalin actually held power and had to defend it against hostile empires and genocidal fascists” argument online and in person many times. From those conversations I’ve learned that calling (for instance) FDR and everyone to his right (including all modern Democrats) “moderate fascists” comes across as crank shit, and most people tune out when they hear crank shit. Even people who stick it out and eventually become leftists clock it as crank shit! It doesn’t work, so why are we so dug in on it? (My guess: a mix of contrarianism and residual “he was a Great Man so his word is infallible” thinking.) It’s not even a good point to go to the mat on; see below.
pragmatic alliance made for lack of better alternatives
This is “if 99% Hitler and 100% Hitler are on the ballot, you should pragmatically vote for 99% Hitler.” We rightly point out the problems with this logic when libs tell it to us. There are two ways to resolve this contradiction:
- Argue that WWII was a more dire situation than we face today, so more compromises were necessary. This has some merit, but is undermined by the USSR seeking anti-Nazi alliances well before the war and seeking continued peace with the Allies in its immediate aftermath. It’s further undermined by how bad the Allies were (the “99% Hitler” countries’ genocides were the blueprint for the Holocaust, and they had recently invaded the USSR), and how dire the situation is today (climate change is on track to be more destructive than WWII).
- Argue that Stalin was not infallible, and got some things wrong, and that his “moderate wing of fascism” take was not his best work. Argue that as bad as social democracies are, there is some meaningful difference between them and Nazis (what Stalin actually did).
The second approach is at least as theoretically sound as the first, and it does not cause most people to think “oh I’m dealing with a crank, I can disregard.”
The quote that social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism, doesn’t mean the same thing as saying social democrats are fascist. The quote acknowledges the subjective difference, the fact that social democrats view themselves differently. What the quote neans is that, despite this subjective difference, despite the intentions of social democrats, their efforts ultimately only serve to help and enable fascism, because it accepts capital and the liberal democratic framework.
Repeating the quote now, today, is not the same thing as saying AOC is a fascist. You are misunderstanding the quote. And are further misunderstanding the history, and using a misunderstanding of that history to justify your misunderstanding of the quote
I get that you care about optics on this site and think that it should be the same as irl organizing. I don’t agree with that, but if that’s your point, okay. I can accept that’s what you think and you care about it even if i don’t. But i want to point out how you are misinterpreting the quote. Not because i think Stalin is a “great man” or “infallible”, and not because I’m “contrarian,” but because i think the quote is right, and important for communists or peoole who want to be on an actual left to understand. If you want our optics held to the same standard as irl organizing, then i insist we hold our education to the same standard. Because if we’re organizing, it should be with people that are capable of understanding this quote - otherwise we’ll end up organized with the kind of people this quote refers to who will betray and destroy any real left efforts
Calling someone a moderate fascists is calling them a fascist the same way calling someone a moderate Democrat is calling them a Democrat. We don’t make any real distinction when we add “moderate” (“if the time ever comes understand she’ll advocate the same insane violence against us that the fascists will”), people don’t hear a distinction, and it’s ridiculous to try and retroactively try and create some thin theoretical difference when this is pointed out.
The only reason people (sometimes) add the “moderate” modifier is they’re memeing about a Stalin quote they haven’t actually interrogated, and it seems most people haven’t even read:
Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism… They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution.
We can’t say “if you sit down at a table with fascists you’re a fascist” all day then pretend “moderate fascist, fascism’s twin” means “not fascist.”
think that it should be the same as irl organizing
I never said anything like this. I said this place is useful for moving people left, and that it will be less useful for that if we get so up our own online asses that we can’t tell when we’re saying crank shit that doesn’t even have a good theoretical basis.
