If you disagree with any of the things I said, then please do so. I would love to have my perspective broadened by more well thought out points of view. But all I get from most liberals and anticommunists is the same reheated arguments I’ve seen debunked over and over and over.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your main point.
Though the arguments you make will not work on anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
You kinda cope in there by saying that the governments that called themselves socialist in the past were democratic, which is kind of not true for a lot of them. There’s degrees to it but for the most part they weren’t.
I think it’s smarter for us to distance ourselves from those governments as they ultimately didn’t really represent our views, not mine at least.
The other problem is the Engels On Authority ass first paragraph, equating use of violence with authoritarianism.
When you do thay you kinda just come off as an authoritarian if people aren’t already familiar with your definitions (similar to using the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat.)
The argument is also just silly and I wish I could go back in time and stop it from entering the material world but I am too lazy to write about it. A lot of libertarian communists have written about it over the past century so you can probably fish something up if you look.
You kinda cope in there by saying that the governments that called themselves socialist in the past were democratic, which is kind of not true for a lot of them. There’s degrees to it but for the most part they weren’t.
I would love some examples here. The Soviets conducted elections. The Chinese conduct elections. The Koreans conduct elections. The Cubans conduct elections. The Vietnamese conduct elections. My argument is not that any of their practices of democracy are without criticism, but that they are fundamentally more legitimate than any capitalist practice of democracy thanks to the elimination of bourgeois election influence ie PACs, donations, mass media campaigns, etc.
I think it’s smarter for us to distance ourselves from those governments as they ultimately didn’t really represent our views, not mine at least.
And I pointedly disagree with this. When you say “I am a socialist but every other socialist government was bad” you are severely undercutting your own argument right out of the gate. You should instead say, “I am a socialist because socialists have achieved great things” and fight back against the received propaganda about our movement that afflicts most of western society.
