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The vital context is wielding state power against internal threats. Which literally every state must do to continue to exist. It's not whataboutism to point out that the state you currently live in is currently doing far worse, for far worse reasons in a context where your criticism can only be used for anticommunism.
Would you say it's constructive for an Israeli to be critical of gay rights in Palestine? Of course not, because divorced of context, it only carries water for imperialism
The problem is the violence of the totalitarian regimes you defend harms innocents too, which is why serious communists shouldn't advocate for that kind of power abuse any more than they should advocate for Western imperialism. It's not that hard.
Nobody is advocating power abuse. One of the books I try to get people to read, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia contextualizes the scale of and how such abuses occurred in a much more useful criticism than "communism bad Stalin evil, that's why you can't ever do anything about rightists organizing against the state".
A good accompaniment to illustrate what it looks like and what the consequences are when the left fails to take appropriate action once in power is The Jakarta Method
That's precisely the extent of my criticism. Understanding stalinism instead of just demonizing it is a good thing, if only to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But the end doesn't justify the means. Apologism is not OK.
It's OK to take a stance against power abuses, and vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.
Suppression of the right was necessary, however the relative freedom given to locals to carry it out resulted in people using it to settle old scores or non-ideological people to advance politically within the party. While dekulization enabled them, those actions were orthogonal (and actually hindered) the aims of dekulization.
Whether that can be considered justification or apologia isn't constructive IMO. Personally though, I just consider it an error in the way it was carried out.
Similar issues (and resulting sentiments) are observed in the wake of Mao giving villages the freedom to set up their own courts and try landlords and others.
We had that struggle back when Kruschev sent the tanks into Hungary and every western leftist org was falling over each other to denounce the USSR. Meanwhile nazis were being put in charge of police forces in South America to do crimes against humanity against indigenous and communist elements and hundreds of thousands were being massacred in South Korea.
Turns out the tankies were right. Denouncing the enemies of the state you live in just serves to carry water for imperialism.
By using the kind of the repression they used on the public, they proved they were no better than the capitalists they despise so much.
Someone that actually cares about left-wing politics cares a lot more about the outcomes than which faction comes ahead. Politics aren't a game of Risk. Actions have consequences, and humanity as a whole loses when innocents get killed by brainwashed idiots.
If stalinist Russia is what utopia is supposed to be, I'm not interested, thank you.
Yes, that's why I recommended The Jakarta Method, it details exactly what the outcome looks like when the left doesn't repress the right and instead lets the sabotage and organize. It's really an important book because you can see echos of the methods in South Korea under the dictatorship, Taiwan during the white terror, Pinochet's Chile, Uruguay even before the '73 coup, etc.
If you believe this, you do not know the scale and details of capitalist repression.
Literally no Marxist would call any AES project Utopian, except as a pejorative.
Here's a pamphlet differentiating Utopian and Scientific Socialism It's not an easy read due to being from 1880.
I know what the outcomes look like when the "left" represses the right and everybody else, including themselves. And your failure to see how undesirable those outcomes may be to leftists around the world is precisely the beef we have against Lemmygrad, Nazbear and tankies in general. You do not represent us, and we'll never be allies. Even worse, you guys actively sabotage leftism by keeping red-scare era scarecrows alive. I'm glad you're such an insignificant minority that we can contain, to be quite frank. The tankie problem used to be way worse on Lemmy less than a year ago.
I know my local revolutionnary/communist party, despite being leninist, is fiercely anti-Stalin, for instance. The fixation on defending totalitarianism is frankly bizarre.
You sound like you're talking about trotskyists, who have been the main ones keeping the old communist scarecrows alive on the left
I remember going to one of my local groups anti-fascism reading years back and it was mostly a bunch of white people rambling about how evil Stalin was.
By comparison the student maoists I've known have way more nuanced opinions on Stalin and actually do community and propaganda work rather than selling newspapers
Well, you're right they do sell newspapers. Their first issue was about rehabilitating Lenin, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them as Trotskyists.
That's literally what every trot org does, they sing Lenins praises, while continuing to bicker about factional infighting from close to a hundred years ago.
I have family members who were (forcibly) internally resettled in the USSR who hold less of a grudge against Stalin than some American trots I've encountered.